Nei Appam

Karthigai deepam festival is my kid's one of his favourite festivals . He loves everything about this festival right from selecting the  diyas and candles from shops and thinking about where to place them. He keeps on roaming around them to check whether all diyas and candles are lightened perfectly. It just remembers our childhood days ..isn't it??😁

 Today's recipe is karthigai deepam special Nei Appam recipe. You can prepare this in two ways , either with Raw rice or with wheat flour.

The recipe which I have shared here is with Raw rice. Check this out and celebrate your karthigai deepam festival.

Preparation time: 20 minutes + soaking time

Yields : around 20 appams

Ingredients:

Raw rice                 - 1 cup ( pacharisi)
Jaggery                    - 1 cup ( vellam)
Chopped coconut  - 1/4 cup
Cardamom              - 2 ( elakkai)
Baking soda             - a pinch
Ghee + oil                 - for frying

Procedure:

Wash and soak raw rice for an hour.  Break jaggery into tiny pieces.

You can see here for video recipe in Tamil

Add chopped jaggery and 3 tbsp of water to a pan. Let it boil in Lower flame. Once all the jaggery has melted, switch off the flame and filter it. This is done to remove the impurities from Jaggery.

Grind together soaked raw rice and cardamom to a thick batter adding less water . You can replace cardamom with 1/4 TSP cardamom powder. If you are using cardamom powder, you can add directly to appam batter.

Add jaggery syrup and chopped coconut to the rice batter . Mix everything well .

At the time of frying add a pinch of baking soda to the batter. You should start preparing appam immediately after adding baking soda or else it won't work as expected .

Always dishes prepared with only raw rice will be hard. To make it soft , we are adding baking soda. You can also use cooking soda or appam soda.

If you don't want to use soda salt at all, you can replace it with robusta banana. I have tried with other bananas too, but it tastes good only with robusta banana. If you are using banana grind it at last while grinding raw rice .

Take a paniyaram pan. Grease it with oil + ghee .Add batter to it. Cook it on both sides in medium flame. Serve it hot.

If you don't have paniyaram pan, you can directly fry in oil but it will absorb lot of oil..

Happy cooking 🎉🎊