It is the highlight of the festival with the whole family looking forward to the sweetness and comfort of rice, dal, sugar and ghee, not forgetting of course the obligatory cashew and green raisins.
As a dessert or sweet dish on every other occasion the humble chakkara pongal is quite often overlooked. What's not to like in this dish? It is filling, comforting and full of flavour on account of the dal and cardamom used to flavour it.
Recipe to follow shortly
It is more than a couple of years since I started this post, and it is high time this is completed.
It seems to me that with every passing year the cooking communities are reaching out to each other to pinch an idea here and there to give a new twist to their own traditional ones. I am referring here to the 'rice pudding' which is a pale comparison to our chakkara pongal. Recently I have seen English programmes giving their pudding a makeover by adding caramel to it, adding generous doses of butter and brown sugar. All it remains for someone to do would be to change the flavouring by adding cardomom to it, and garnishing it with some fried cashew nuts and hey presto there you have it....... chakkara pongal. Of course it still wouldnt be the same, without the addition of our paruppu to lend it the nutty richness we all love so much.
So here is the recipe as we make it in our family.
Ingredients
Raw rice - 1 cup
Moong dal - 1/3 cup (can be increased to 1/2 cup if preferred)
Jaggery - 1 1/2 cup (increase or decrease to suit your palate)
Cardamom - 5 to 6
Ghee - 4 Tbsps
Split cashews and green raisins a handful
Pacha karpooram a pinch
Milk (optional) - substitute half the water mentioned below for milk.
Method
Wash the rice and dhal and cook in the pressure cooker with roughly two and a half times the amount of water. I reduce the flame to simmer once the first whistle sounds and remove it from the hob after five mins.
If cooking on the stove top cook the grains till they are well done and easily get crushed when pressed between your fingers.
While the rice and dhal cook, make a syrup of the jaggery by powdering it roughly and adding 1/2 cup of water to it. Let it cook till the jaggery melts, filter it to get rid of any dirt or sediment. If you find a lot of 'scum' rising to the top as the jaggery is heating remove this before filtering.
Take a heavy bottomed vessel and place it on the stove.
Add the cooked rice and dhal. Pour the melted and strained jaggery syrup and cook till it gets absorbed.
While the pongal is coming together, fry the cashew nuts and raisins in a tablespoon of ghee and set aside.
Crush the cardomom seeds to fine powder and add it to the rice and jaggery mixture.
Stir well, add the remaining ghee to the pongal and cook for a further few minutes.
If you are using the pacha karpooram, crush and powder this adding it to some milk. Pour this over the pongal and mix well.
Now add the fried cashew and raisins and remove.
