Following from Sheetal’s post on ghesh, or the Gujarati variant of kanji, here is pazhaiya sadam or pazhaiya soru, as Tamilians will know altogether too well. The day’s leftover rice is covered with water and left to ferment overnight. By morning, it has a light tang from developing lactic acidity. It’s mixed with a little buttermilk, salted, and consumed as breakfast with a green chilli for spice, perhaps. Sometimes, there’s an onion alongside, or lime pickle. This is a traditional early-morning food for farmers, but my mother grew up with such breakfasts, too, in the days before refrigeration. These days, we are re-learning and remembering the great importance of fermentation to the maintenance of balance in our gut’s microbiome. Fermentation increases the bioavailability of trace minerals and other nutrients, making vastly greater amounts of iron, for instance, available to the body from pazhaya sadam than from just cooked rice. Our Indian culinary traditions of fermentation are many and diverse, and rice is central to a good many of them. Rice is food in two senses after all: for us, and for all the wild yeasts and hungry bacteria out there.
The rice I used here is the semi-polished illuppaipoo samba, so named because the rice apparently carries the fragrance of the illuppai flower, or mahua, botanically the Mahua longifolia that grows in the South (as distinct from the Madhuca latifolia that is more common in the rest of India). I say “apparently” because the farmer from whom we sourced this rice had parboiled his stock to extend its life—which, as with refrigeration, comes with its benefits and its costs! In this case, the cost was the loss of the rice’s characteristic fragrance.
Keralites know this dish as “pazhankanji”—suggesting that there’s only a thin line between the classic kanji and pazhaiya sadam. My version is topped with caramelized onions and garlic (because my boys love both), a touch of raw onion, coriander for crunch and minimal chilli for that spicy kick I cannot live without. Odia cuisine knows fermented rice as pakhala and celebrates it far more elaborately than us in the South. But perhaps it’s time we changed all that.
Pazhaiya Choru or “Old rice”
Ingredients
- For the fermented rice
- Up to 1 cup of cooked rice; short to medium-grain amylose-rich varieties will be best for fermentation
- Salt to taste
To serve
- ½ cup yoghurt or buttermilk
- Chopped sambhar onions
- 1 spicy green chilli
- Lime pickle
Instructions
- Gather a day’s leftover rice in a pot, add just enough water to cover, and use your hands to mash up a little. Leave this out to ferment overnight, covered.
- Depending on the ambient temperatures and the type of rice used, the mixture will sour more or less, but it is typical to consume this for breakfast the next morning.
To serve
- Mix in the salt, and the yogurt or just the buttermilk until you have the consistency you desire.
- Top with chopped onions, green chillies and serve with lime pickle on the side.
- If you don’t like the taste of too many raw onions, you could lightly sautee these before adding—but take care to stop the cooking before they become too soft and lose all their tasty crunch.
Notes
- You could save a few spoonfuls of the fermented rice water to add to the next-day’s old rice–like a starter culture. Eventually this will improve taste and also make the fermentation process a little faster.
- If ambient temperatures are too warm, consider leaving the rice out in a clay pot
- If the temperatures are too cool, then leaving it in a regular stainless steel vessel, perhaps covered with a towel, may help achieve optimal fermentation temperatures.
- For those in the US or other colder countries, leaving this in an oven with the light on, or near the warmth of a fridge are also methods to try.
