Weekend food guide: Kerala’s parippu vada is a crispy delight best eaten with tea or a banana


Weekend food guide: Kerala’s parippu vada is a crispy delight best eaten with tea or a banana

A 9-step guide to making these crunchy snacks in 30 minutes, which also serves 15 people



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Here's how you can make these golden-brown fritters, famed for its taste in Kerala Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese

Crispy, brown and tasty – that’s what Kerala’s parippu vada (fritters made with lentils) are known for. Made with a handful of ingredients, this savoury goes best with ‘chaya’ (tea) at 4pm. Made with lentils, shallots, onion, ginger, chillies, and curry leaves, this snack follows an easy recipe, which is also why it is exclusively popular in tea stalls or chayakadas, even though its available at restaurants as well.

Other than the chaya and parippu vada combination, this fried snack is also best paired with apple bananas, which are also natively known as poovan pazham.

Now that you’ve gotten an idea of this recipe, here’s how you can make it at home:

Ingredients

  • 300 gms split peas, Bengal gram split or pigeon peas
  • 50 gms shallots
  • 50 gms onion
  • 1 inch long ginger
  • 3 green chilli
  • 2 dry red chilli
  • 1 sprig curry leaves
  • Salt to taste
  • ½ tsp asafoetida (hing)
  • 100 ml cooking oil

Method:

Step 1: Wash and clean the pulses and lentils thoroughly. Soak the mix in water for about three hours, and then drain.

Note: Make sure the mix is completely dry before adding it into the blender.

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Soak the dal for 3 hours... Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese

Step 2: Without adding water, grind the mix in the blender. But before you do this step, keep two tablespoons of the mix aside.

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Keep two tablespoons aside, and coarsely grind the dal Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese

Step 3: Finely chop the shallots, onion ginger, green chilli and dry red chilli together.

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Finely chop the other ingredients Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese

Step 4: Add the chopped ingredients and two tablespoons of mix set aside into the blended mix, combine well.

Step 5: Also add the asafoetida and salt to taste to the mix.

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Here's how your final mix should look Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese

Step 6: Moisten your palm with some water and take a small amount of batter, flatten it and shape it into a small and round patty.

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Mould the mix into a thin spherical shaped patty Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese

Step 7: Take a pan with a thick base, add oil. Once heated, reduce the flame to medium, and check the oil temperature by dropping tiny dollops of the batter in the oil. If it rises to the surface of the oil quickly, you are good to go.

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Deep fry the patties in oil till it turns golden-brown and crispy Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese

Step 8: Carefully slide the patties one-by-one, and deep fry them in batches, till both sides turn golden brown.

Step 9: Once fried, allow it to cool before serving it fresh with a cup of tea or a banana.

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Serve it fresh and hot with tea or banana Image Credit: Supplied/Sobha Varghese
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