AAppam / Palm Jaggery Aappam

This is a common street food you can see it in my home town Madurai,TamilNadu. Kids will mostly like this recipe. You can get this appam in Madurai in morning hours alone. In the evening hours vendors will sell this apam flour alone and not cooked appams. If you pay a visit to Madurai, you can see in the streets , ladies sitting in street corner cooking appams and selling it from 6 am to 8.30 am. There will be a good crowd to buy these appams. Kids will be standing in their school uniforms to buy these appams for their lunch box. There will be a great demand for this dish on Sundays. and you dont need any sauces or side dish for this. It itself a complete meal.

When I heard about street food contest, I was thinking a while what to prepare for it. I start going to look all our buddies blog and I saw sweet paniyarams in solaichidambaram’s blog and start cooking it with little changes from his original one. You can see his original recipe HERE.

He has cooked that recipe as “Sweet Paniyarams” but with the ingredients he has specified, am going to cook it as “Appams”. He has used idli rice in his recipe but am using pulungal rice in mine.

Ingredients:

Boiled Rice / Pulungal Arisi – 1 and ½ cups
Raw Rice / Pacharisi - 1 cup
Black Gram / Urad Dhal – 2 tbsp
Fenugreek Seed – ½ tbsp
Palm Jaggery / Karupatti - 1 cup or ¼ kg (Powdered it)
Butter or Cooking Oil

Cooking Instructions:




Soak both the rice, black gram and fenugreek seeds in water for 3 hours. Wash and clean the rice and grind it for about half an hour as a smooth batter. The batter should not be too thick or too watery. You prepare it as you prepare for usual appams. Do not add salt and let it to ferment for 8 to 10 hours.

The other day morning, before u prepare appams, boil the powered jaggery in a cup of water. Allow it to boil. When the palm jiggery powder is completely dissolved in water, switch off the stove and add that syrup to the prepared batter. The batter should be watery. You can add water If u require.

Heat a shallow pan or aapam kadai and apply a liitle oil on the surface of the pan. I have used aapam kadai to prepare the dish. Take a small ladle of batter and pour it into the pan. Gently swirl the pan around so that thin layer of batter covers the side of the pan and the thick layer covers the centre of the pan. Apply a tsp of butter on the sides of the pan and cover it with the lid until one side of the appam has become golden brown. Now turn it to its other side and cook until it is golden brown. Aapam is ready to serve.



This is my one more entry to sia's MBP-Street Food Contest.