Akkara Adisal: The Ambrosia Of The Gods
Monday 12 March 2007
Akkara Adisal is the quintessentially Iyengar dish that has an unsurpassable taste. Be it any festival or a birthday in the family, finishing a sumptuous meal with this for dessert will be the perfect high note. Add a pinch of pachai karpooram to it just before serving and you'd realise that this is the ambrosia of the gods.
Raw rice - 1 cup, washed
Jaggery - 2 cups
Water - 6 cups
Milk - 2 cups
Ghee - 4 tbsp
Cashew - 10, broken into pieces
Raisins - 10
Cardomon - 2-3 pods
*Pachai karpooram - a pinch
Take a cup of rice (I use ponni raw rice), wash it a couple of times and strain the water off it. Heat two tablespoons of ghee in a heavy-bottomed kadai and add the rice to the ghee. Saute it for a few minutes, making sure the rice doesn't burn.
Transfer the rice to a small vessel, add a cup of milk and pressure cook it. I usually wait for two whistles before I switch it off. Meanwhile, take two cups of jaggery, mix three cups of water to it and boil the mixture in the kadai.
After about 5 - 10 minutes, take the mixture off the flame, cool it off a little and strain it. This gets rid of the stones, pieces of sugarcane husk and other assorted impurities that find their way into jaggery. Once done, pour the mixture back in the kadai and boil again, till the mixture thickens a bit. Now add the cooked rice and let it all boil together till the rice gets cooked completely. Add three cups of well boiled milk (sunda kaachina milk) to the mixture and let it all simmer together for a few minutes.
Roast the broken cashew pieces and raisins in the ghee and add those to the payasam along with powdered cardomom and pachai karpooram.
Your akkara adisal is now ready.
Warning: addictive!
*Addition of this to the akkara adisal (or any other payasam) is optional. But this ingredient has a heavenly smell that always reminds me of my gran and her kitchen. Guaranteed to take your dessert up by a few notches and earn the label of 'heavenly'.
+Note: One can make it to be of a slightly thicker consistency - the result would be akin to chakkarai pongal then.
Posted by DesiGirl 11:35
Labels: akkara adisal, ambrosia, dessert, food, iyengar, kheer, payasam
You are blogrolled :)
My mum's a tam iyengar so we should have comparable recipes. Here's to some mutal swapping!!