How to choose native rice for Idiappams & Ottu Shyavige 

With photographic and editorial inputs by Deepa Reddy.

Ottu Shyavige: an epitome of labour and love! This has to be one of the most graceful and luscious breakfast recipes ever invented by southern cooks. Piles of noodles streaming out of a shyavige press in the early morning with the incense of fresh vegetables in pools of bubbling coconut milk on the other side of the kitchen, calls to something deep within ourselves.

Steaming seals the flavours and nutrients of the ingredients. In the bygone eras of traditional cooking, muslin cloth materials and a wide range of leaves were used along with the kalai coated brass steamers for making steamy hot thindis or breakfast recipes as we call them now!

Women, after a bath and the morning rituals, would just be seen stoking wood fires in the adige kone or kitchen, wearing neatly draped cotton/ silk sarees, combed hair tied up to a bun and perched in the adige kone which used to be completely steamy and smoky. A soothing melody of clinking bangles and clanking brass and copper thambala, koda and soutu served as orchestral accompaniment. The total sensory world of the kitchen!

The Ottu Shyavige pictured here is made from kusublakki or kuchalakki, parboiled varieties from coastal and Malenadu regions of Karnataka, that was washed and soaked the previous night. But read on for ways to decide whether the native rice you have on hand can work for making these delicate and delicious noodles.

THE PROCESS

There are two ways to make ottu shyavige: from rice flour and from whole rice, as I’ve done here. Let’s look at the process first, and then come to how best to select a native rice for it.

Using rice flour a shortcut that produces good results, but the noodles produced from double-cooking (stovetop, cooling, and then steaming) are softer and with a better bite because the starches have been worked on in stages a bit more. Think of what happens to the best long-grain “fluffy” rice, when you cook it too much, but then allow it to dry/cool, and then use just steam to revive it and restore its bounce. Like that.

1.A MAKE YOUR flour

To make your own flour, wash the rice well and spread out on a towel to almost-dry. This hydrates the grain somewhat and makes it more brittle. Now send it off to a rice mill, or process in a home mixie–you’ll need to remove, sieve out the rice bits, and re-grind until you get a consistently fine flour. Watch this video (embedded below, from about 3:18 on, for more on the process and working with iluppai poo samba).

1.B OR, Grind whole grains into batter

To grind the whole rice batter, you’ll need to have soaked the rice overnight. Then, a stone grinder or dosa grinder works best simply because it gives you the texture you need (fine) without heating the batter too much at a stage when really what is needed is ambient hydration and water penetration—heating comes later. I added some coconut too, but you can leave that out and sprinkle it on top of the finished noodles instead. It does add wonderfully to the taste though.

2. Make the roux

Many going the flour route skip this first cooking that produces a roux, and just add hot water to rice flour instead. The presumption is that using hot water is sufficient to hydrate and start gelatinization. Depending on the rice chosen, this may be true, or it may not produce the best results.

The cooking step that produces a roux is more foolproof. Add water enough to cook the batter until it thickens, and produces a koozh or custard/pudding-like texture.

3. fill the presses, press the noodles

This part needs little explanation, but takes some patience with equipment. Prep your steamer plates ahead of time by greasing them or using banana or other leaves to line. Press the noodles directly onto them so that you can go directly to steaming and don’t have to move the delicate (breakable) noodles.

Pressing out idiappam noodles from the small metallic hand press you see on the left above is easy enough–fill the body and crank them out. These presses come with multiple plates that can be used to change shape or used for making murukus, chaklis and other snacks. Using a more traditional wooden press or the sevai nazhi (shown on the right above) is tougher because the noodles produced for sevai are typically much finer–and you quite literally have to press them out. If the roux isn’t just right, it gets pressed upwards while the noodles come downwards, and you have to clean and refill a few times until you get the quantities you want. It’s worth it in the end, but it all takes some doing.

4. Steam the noodles

Steaming here is just a last rehydration that restores bounce and “activates” that slight gluten-like elasticity that rice starches have when they are cooked and cooled and steamed again. The same principle works for making kozhakattais or steamed dumplings.

5. serve!

10-15 minutes of steaming does the trick. Do not store the pressed noodles for too long before steaming, or the effects will not be the same (more starch retrogradation than needed will have taken place) and the rice’s cakiness will be more prominent.

Idiyappams are best when served with both sweetened coconut milk and vegetable stew. If your noodles break up or you have leftovers (gasp!), they can be tempered to make chitranna (lemon rice or mango rice), simple uppmas, or even payasam.

Selecting Rice for the best Noodles

What we tend to love about noodles are their springiness, chewiness and firmness—or rather the fact that they have a slight elasticity and do not become pasty. The stores will sell you an “idiappam maavu” or flour for idiappam/ottu shyavige, but these days we have no idea what rice was used to make this flour, we may want to choose a native variety– plus we may not want to make noodles from flour, or we may want to make our own flour! For all these reasons, it’s a good idea to understand what’s going on with the making of these rice noodles in the first place.

• Rice that is relatively higher in amylose is necessary–noodle-making means overcoming stickiness, not enhance it. How would you know how much amylose is in your rice? A rule of thumb is that rice that itself has these properties of springiness, chewiness and firmness just as cooked rice will work for noodles. So the rice, so the noodle!
• The choice is typically a parboiled rice, simply because the parboiling creates a grain whose texture we want in a noodle, with the right nutritional and especially starch configurations.
• Aromatic rices are a possibility but not for texture as much as aroma. Think of all the scents that float everywhere with the steaming! Iluppaipoo samba, Gandasale should work, as will Jeeraga samba. The trouble with aromatic rices is that they’re usually kept and sold raw—and this recipe produces much better texture with parboiled rice. But the parboiled iluppaipoo samba we’ve tried and the parboiled garudan samba (from Rivera Organics) have been excellent, and should be tried.

• Too much bran, protein etc. will interfere, so at most use a semi-polished rice. Some Karnataka kuchalakki/parboiled rice varieties here may work even being unpolished brown rice.
• Basmati will make great noodles and perhaps even better sevai (broken noodles), but it is also much too prized and pricey a rice and who wants to break those long grains in the first place? This is largely why shorter grain rice is more typical, as is parboiled rice with already a greater firmness and chewiness that becomes the noodle’s final texture. Think: parboiled Kichili Samba (from Vivasayee’s Life)
• Don’t use the waxy rices that would make a good paella or khichdi or kheer easily [Here’s looking at you, Ambamor]. They will wind up as pasty in noodles as they are creamy in the dishes we love.
• Rice flour obtained from freshly harvested rice is usually soft and sticky compared to flour from aged rice–which is why it makes such a good pongal. So, old rice is definitely preferable to new.
• Black rices and sticky red rices will not work. The resulting noodles will be sticky and pasty—not tasty!
• The double-cooking here is also essential. When making idiappams from flour, it is typical to use hot water—or better, to cook rice flour and water into a roux first, and then press noodles. This process “pregelatinizes” the rice starch so that it mimics or starts to perform some of the same function as gluten, thereby providing firm structure and avoiding stickiness after cooking.

For more on how rice starch works, read our “All you need to know about rice starch” summary!