Mamidikaya Kobbari Pachadi

[Hi,
I've noticed that people are finding this post through Google recently. If you're looking to reproduce a well-made version you've had, please look at my pictures and description down at the bottom of the page and let me know if I got in the neighborhood. I like what I made, but it may not be in any way "right" and I'm curious. Thanks much.]

Here's another recipe without much of a story behind it, I'm afraid. I just picked up a coconut, some mangoes and curry leaves from the CSA, and hunted until I found a recipe that used substantial amounts of all three. This is a raw mango-coconut chutney from, according to Sailus Food's website, Andhra which is a state in southeast India.

I found a fair number of variations on the dish, mostly varying the coconut to mango ratio and the spice level. This is about average in the ratio but it's tons spicier than most.

This was my second time opening up a coconut and my first time dealing with a fully ripe one. The husk was a lot more dried out and fibrous this time around which made it rather easier to deal with. I was able to get it all off without breaking open the hull. For opening the shell, I used the technique I've seen of striking the coconut along its equator with the back of a hatchet, rotating between blows and continuing until it splits. It worked pretty quickly and made a surprisingly clean split. I'm taking an inordinate amount of pride in an accomplishment monkeys and crabs manage daily; I'm not really sure why.

Some recipes specified using a green mango for sourness, but the green mangoes to get around here are just bland so I went with a more ripe one. I got lucky that the one I picked was fairly tart. I didn't think it was tart enough, though, so I used the standard Indian technique of adding tamarind to supplement.

Ingredients:
1 teaspoon cooking oil
1 1/2 Tablespoons whole coriander seeds
3/4 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
whole dried red chillies to taste (I used 5 arbols for a good bit of heat)
8 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 stem curry leaves, removed from stem

1 cup freshly grated (or processed) coconut
3/4 cup raw mango, peeled and chopped
1-2 Tablespoons tamarind paste, loosened in 1-2 Tablespoons water and strained
salt to taste

1/2 teaspoon cooking oil
1/2 teaspoon whole mustard seeds
1 stem curry leaves, removed from stem
2 dried red chillies, seeded and torn

1. Heat the teaspoon of oil in a small frying pan over medium heat. Add coriander, cumin and chiles and fry for two minutes until aromatic, reducing heat if the spices start to burn. Reduce the heat to medium low, add the garlic and curry leaves and fry for another minute until the curry leaves become aromatic. Remove to a small bowl to cool slightly.

2. Once the spices are cool enough to deal with, add to a food processor and process for a few pulses. Add the coconut, mango and tamarind and process for 2-3 minutes until it forms a coarse paste. [Looking at it at this point, I have little faith that this is going to result in anything edible.]

3. Clean out the small frying pan, add the 1/2 teaspoon of oil. Heat briefly over medium heat and add mustard seeds. Cover with a splatter screen and heat until the seeds pop. Add the curry leaves and chiles and cook for just a few seconds to bring out the flavors. Stir into the mango-coconut paste.

Serve over white rice topped with a couple spoonfuls of ghee.



Once again this is not a particularly visually attractive dish, but it's actually really good. It's creamy (no doubt from the coconut oil) --a little gritty, but without that unpleasant dried coconut chewiness. The flavor is complex: aromatically spicy, toasty and sweet. The coconut and garlic are prominent, both pleasantly toasty, but I'm not getting any mango flavor beyond the sweetness and not a lot of tanginess from the tamarind either. Still, they must be adding to the gestalt. There's surprisingly little heat considering how many hot peppers went into there, but there's a nice warmth in the aftertaste. I'm sorry I can't explain the flavor better; it's not quite like anything I've had before. Really good, though; I stand by that.

CSA week 20 - Malted honey peanut butter balls two ways

I found this recipe on the thekitchen.com blog and there was some discussion in the comments of this being (or at least being a variation on) a traditional American recipe, but I've never seen it before and Googling doesn't turn it up anywhere else. Their recipe tweaks a recipe in from the 1976 More-with-Less Cookbook. I suppose that's enough time for it to filter out a little and the origin to be forgotten. You can see their version here. For my first version I tweaked the recipe a little more but still kept it simple.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 cup natural unsweetened creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup honey
1 cup malted milk powder
1/3 cup white chocolate

1. Toast coconut flakes (carefully as they go from raw to burnt very quickly) and break them up into small bits in a clean spice or coffee grinder.

2. Mix coconut bits with honey, peanut butter and malted milk powder until they form a slightly sticky, crumbly lump. I found that the full cup of powder didn't want to incorporate so I had to knead it in like getting all of flour into a wet dough.

3. Let rest a short while to hydrate, then pinch off pieces and roll into balls.

4. Melt white chocolate in microwave or in a double boiler. Dip each ball into the chocolate and set somewhere cool to firm up. If you store them in the refrigerator, let them warm up a bit before serving.

OK, maybe that's not quite as simple as the original mix-then-roll-into-balls, but the toasting and the white chocolate are good additions.

This was good, but messy at Miami room temperature as the balls slumped and expressed oil while the white chocolate melted. Also, I wasn't entirely happy with the grainy final texture. I was clear that while the malted milk was fully incorporated a lot of it was only mixed in and not dissolved.

I wondered what would happen if I melted the honey, peanut butter and white chocolate together and then mixed in the powders. Secondarily, I had just bought a bottle of amber agave nectar. I had only tried the light version before and I was wondering how this slightly more flavorful version would work in this recipe.

That makes the new recipe:
1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 cup natural unsweetened creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup agave nectar
1 cup malted milk powder
1/3 cup white chocolate
a few drops vanilla

1. Toast coconut flakes and grind them into a paste oozing coconut oil in a clean spice or coffee grinder. (Another change there to smooth out the texture.)

2. In small saucier, melt peanut butter, nectar, vanilla and chocolate and stir until homogeneous. Stir in coconut and malted milk powder and blend. When the powders have been fully incorporated, pour the mixture out into a small container to cool. The texture at this point was the gooey sticky napalm of melted marshmallow so may have been possible to whip in some air to adjust the texture as it cooled, but I just let it settle into a dense brick and sliced it up into rectangular cuboids. (That's the right term; don't blame me. Hyperrectangle or 3-D orthotope are close, but imply hollowness. That leaves out 'box', too.)


I took both into work and had a taste test. The results were close, but by a small margin everyone preferred the second version. The texture ended up somewhere between caramel and fudge, which is a good place for a candy to end up and sure you'll agree. I pressed the point that the crumblier candy and creamy chocolate coating made the first version much more interesting texturally, but good was preferred over interesting (much to my and every other experimental chef's disappointment).

They also liked the purer peanut flavor to the honey/peanut mix. The amber agave really wasn't much different from the light version. They both have the vacant mildly floral sweetness of honeysuckle easily overwhelmed by the stronger flavors at play here. I shouldn't have been surprised; it says "mild" right there on the bottle. The malt and coconut flavors are there too, but they're enriching the peanut, not standing up recognizably on their.


One of my colleagues who's from south India made the interesting observation that the second version's flavors and textures aren't far from some traditional candies from that region. That opens the possibilities of adding cardamom, pistachios, maybe rosewater. Lots of room for further experimentation here, but they're plenty tasty as is too.

CSA week two overflow - black sapote colada sherbet

On second thought, maybe those sapotes are ready to be used after all.

As I mentioned a week ago, my plan for any tropical fruit we get this year is to substitute it into my unexpectedly fabulous piña colada sherbet recipe for either the bananas or the pineapple depending on the texture and see how it turns out. Last July I subbed in mango for the bananas which worked quite well but I haven't gotten back to the idea until now.

I'm taking out the bananas again this time which gives me some concern over texture as bananas are rather special in that regard. But if anything can replace that thick fat-mimicking creaminess is sapote. That makes my ingredient list:
1 large and 1 small black sapote
1 1/2 cups fresh pineapple
2 Tablespoons or so pineapple juice from the container I was keeping the pineapple pieces in
1 cup thick coconut milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon light rum
and
1 Tablespoon dutch process cocoa

The challenge each time I do this is picking the complementary flavors that will bring out the flavor of the guest fruit. In the original I used lime juice and hot sauce. For the mango, lime juice again along with ginger, cinnamon and allspice. This time the obvious choice is to nix the lime and add cocoa. I'll have to do some research to figure out the best choices when canistels and caiminos come along.

No cooking required here so I just tossed everything into the blender and let it spin. The result is, texturally and visually, indistinguishable from chocolate pudding and not far off in flavor either. An ice cream churn is entirely optional; you could serve this as is.




You could, anyway; I've got a bad churining habit to maintain. So I let the mixture cool for eight hours in the back of the fridge and then gave it a turn in the ice cream machine. After 25 minutes it wasn't really solidifying but it was getting lumpy and the bucket was running out of freeze so decided that was good enough and I put it into the freezer to ripen.

And the next day I scooped some out and gave it a try:

It has the mouth feel of premium ice cream without a hint of ice crystals, gumminess, insta-melt or the other ills sherbet is prone to proving again that bananas aren't as special as Alton Brown makes them out to be.

The flavors are muted at freezer temperatures but a couple minutes of warming brings them out intensely with not-quite-chocolate and pineapple at the front fading to a lingering not-quite-chocolate/coconut. The cocoa did a good job highlighting the chocolate-esque notes in the black sapote but it's still clearly cocoa plus tropical fruits. It's an interestingly unusual but quite pleasant combination. Actually, around here it's not so unusual; all the local confectioners use tropical fruits in their chocolates. It is unusual that I like it though. Let's see what my co-workers think.

Coconut cream sherbet

This is a recipe that evolved as it went along rather than being planned from the start so I'll try to take you through the process.

Honestly, I'm surprised it took me as long as it did to come up with "ice cream" as the answer to the question "what am I going to do with the substandard coconut milk and hard to utilize coconut water in my refrigerator?". When it did, my first thought was to go with a simple sorbet: just add the water to the milk, mix in some sugar and dump it in the churn. But the coconut milk was really too mild, even punched up by the coconut water, and, after the punching up, a bit thin.

So I tossed idea of that pure raw drinking-coconut flavor and decided to cook the mixture down. I started with 2 1/4 cups of coconut milk, 1 1/2 cups coconut water and added 3/4 cup sugar. I have this idea in my head that if you boil coconut milk long enough it will caramelize and turn brown the way toasted coconut does. I know that seems improbable, but I remember doing it once even if I can't find the recipe or any mention of such a thing on-line and I remember plenty of recipes I've made where it didn't happen. Anyway, after 20 minutes of it not happening this time too, I figured that was enough and gave up. By that time I had cooked the mixture down to 3 cups even and it was a little thickened up. I added a couple Tablespoons of rum, a squeeze of lime and the zest from that lime wedge and gave it a taste. It was a nice cooked coconut flavor intense enough that I figured I could add a bit of dairy to help the texture without compromising the flavor unduly. So in went a half cup of half-and-half. Now it was tasting rather like coconut cream pie which got me thinking about mix-ins.

Bits of pie crust would, of course, be ideal, but I've been avoiding making pie crust for years and I'm not going to stop now. And supermarket pre-made crusts aren't likely to suit. On the other hand streusel topping's not a bad idea and I keep a little baggie of it pre-made in my pantry for desert emergencies. (Slice up a piece of fruit into an ovenproof bowl, add a bit of jam or juice, toss with a teaspoon of corn starch, cut the streusel mix with butter, sprinkle on top and bake at 350 until golden brown on top and bubbly underneath.) It's been there a while so I don't recall exactly what I put in it. Just flour, sugar, rolled oats and cinammon I think. No idea of ratios.

While the sherbet mix was in the churn, I baked maybe a half cup of streusel (cut with butter, of course) in my toaster oven. I know it looks burnt, but it's not. That burning smell is because I don't clean my crumb tray often enough. OK, maybe it's a little burnt but it's still in the I-can-pretend-I-did-that-on-purpose stage where the burnt flavor is interesting not nasty. I put it in the freezer to cool off while the churning finished and then stirred it in.

And here's the pretty-cool-looking final result:
Disappointingly, the bold coconut flavor of the warm mix and even right out of the churn has faded in the final ripened sherbet. It hasn't faded away entirely, but it's become subtle which moves the streusel a bit more to the forefront that I really wanted. It's not at all bad mind you, but doesn't wow the way I was hoping. The streusel is toasty, spicy and buttery as it should be, but without strong fruit to play against it comes on a bit strong. The texture is a bit crumbly, as sherbets tend to be, but it melts smoothly on the tongue and the streusel bits are still crisp and chewy the way they should be. Given how well it held up, I'm surprised streusel isn't a common ice cream mix in. It's certainly going to be complementing plenty of my fruit-based ice creams in the future.

Cracking the coconut

Last week I got myself a coconut and today I decided to get that thing open. I had to wait until I had a day off because I think this is something best done outside and I don't get home from work until after it's started getting dark these days.

I did a bit of research on coconut opening techniques and found that an expert coconuteer can hold it one hand, a machete in the other and have it open in moments. That was out as I wanted my fingers nowhere near the blade during this process. Another method I've seen is embedding a tall metal or bamboo spike in the ground and repeatedly impaling the coconut and ripping off chunks of husk. If there was a wrought iron fence with pointy bits on top nearby I might give that a try. But since I don't, plan C is to just lay the coconut on an open piece of ground and whack at it with the biggest knife I've got. That knife would be my Chinese cleaver. Not quite a machete, but not bad.

This process has several stages because a coconut has several layers. The labels on the cross-sectional diagram I found are rather botanical but you can see, from outside to in: the outer shell, the fibrous husk, the inner woody hull of the nut (actually a drupe), the meat and the water.

The first step is to cut through the hard shell and then pull the blade sideways to tear out chunks of husk. The shell wasn't as tough as I expected, possibly because this particular coconut is pretty ripe (I'm guessing at that because it's yellow with black spots instead of green like some of the others I saw.), and the husk comes loose with just a bit of effort. But man is there a lot of husk to deal with. I keep on chopping and tearing and chopping and tearing and there's no sign of the brown I expect to see under all of that.

Eventually, maybe 10 minutes later, one cleaver blow goes "chonk" instead of "chumpf" and it seems I've finally hit the hull. But I still don't see anything brown or any sign of separation between the layers that might make things go more easily.

I decide to clear away some more husk to see what there is to see, but I start getting splashed a little and I see I've broken the hull open so it's time to drain out the coconut water. I'm a little disappointed as I had hoped to have a clean solid Gilligan's-Island-looking coconut to work with. For one thing, you get to pound nails into the eyes, pull them out and then pour out the coconut water like a juicebox. Once you've done that, there's a neat trick where you tap the coconut around its circumference with the back of your knife until it cracks open into two pieces. But I'm not going to get to do either. Instead I pour out the coconut water into a bowl, filter out the bit of dirt and husk that got in, and put it away. I read that there's supposed to be less water in a ripe coconut, but I got a fair bit: well over a cup. OK, I've done some more research and while there's a lot of contradictory information out there, I think I've got a half-ripe "water coconut" or "drinking coconut". That explains why I've got so much water. Fully ripe coconuts are relatively dried out, shrunken and hard. I probably wouldn't have been able to get into it using my makeshift methodology so I chose correctly out of the pile at least.

From what I've been reading, there's not much to be done with coconut water except to just drink it (generally with rum). And it is pleasant enough straight, although not nearly as sweet as I was led to expect. I spooned a few teaspoons over the scallops I'm marinating for ceviche; that ought to work.

Since I've got an edge to work with, the husk is easier to peel off, so I clean out some space, break off a chunk, and do it again until I can reach in to scrape out the meat. I've read that this is a tough job that requires special tools and results in flakes, but I'm scraping it out with a teaspoon like an avocado. The texture is more rubbery though--like overcooked lobster. This morning, when I was doing the scraping, I didn't know what to make of this so I figured it was best to play it safe, avoid the recipes calling for flakes of fresh coconut, and just make some coconut milk.

Instructions for coconut milk say to put the coconut meat into a blender with some wildly varying amount of boiling water, blend, let cool, and then squeeze the liquid out through cheesecloth. They also say not to bother as canned coconut milk comes from Thai coconuts which are far superior for the purpose. But I've come this far so I guess I may as well give it a try and see what I get.

I've got over six ounces of coconut flesh as opposed to the two and a half the recipes describe and, from the texture, it's clear it contains a good bit of water it's not supposed to so I blend it with just a couple cups of boiling water. After I cool it, I try to squeeze the liquid through a couple layers of paper towels, since I haven't been able to find cheesecloth anywhere, but the perforations stymie me. Upon closer inspection it doesn't really seem to need filtering as the meat blended in quite nicely. It's also not especially rich, sweet or flavorful as coconut milk goes. I'm not sure I should bother using it all considering I've got cans of far superior product in my pantry. Maybe if I add some sugar and cook it down a bit it may become more appealing. I may not have ended up with a useful ingredient, but I have learned a good bit about coconuts and had an interesting experience so it's not been an entirely wasted effort.