Food! Glorious Food!

I love eating. I love reveling in comfort food as well as trying new and unknown dishes. Eating in Kerala has been amazing. The food here is delicious, and now that I’ve adjusted to the cuisine, I think food is one of the biggest things I will miss about Kerala. So I dedicate this post to food, so that you will better understand what, when, and how I eat in Kerala.

First: We eat with our hands here. To be more specific, we eat with our right hand, neatly scooping fingerfuls of rice into our mouths, without making a mess of our plates or ourselves. This is surprisingly efficient and means fewer dishes to wash after meals.

Meal Times and Dishes:

Breakfast – Around 8am. This is the most interesting meal of the day in my opinion. Here are some common Kerala breakfasts:
• Dosai (pronounced doe-sha) with sambar and/or coconut chutney. Dosai is a soft somewhat sour bread (shaped like a tortilla) made from rice flour, which you dip into sambar, a spicy vegetable curry. (Curries are can range in consistency from soup to thick stew. Sambar is more soup-like.) Alternatively you can dip the dosai in chutney, which is usually a thicker consistency and made with coconut and red or green chilies. The dosai dough can also be shaped into palm-sized ovals, which are called Idli. Idli is also eaten with sambar and chutney for breakfast
• Appaam. Appaam is shaped just like dosai, but the dough is sweeter and contains coconut. It can be eaten with a variety of curries, such as kathala (chickpea) curry – this is one of my favorites! – chicken curry, and egg curry (hardboiled eggs served with an onion, garlic, chili combination).
• Ooppumav. This is another of my favorite dishes. It is basically a cream of wheat dish with onions, chilies, and black pepper. You can eat it with the same curries you eat with appaam, but I think it is best when you mash a banana into it with your fingers. This gives it better consistency and makes it sweeter!
•Pootu. This is basically steamed rice flour with coconut. It’s usually molded in the shape of a log, and then you can break of sections to mix with your breakfast curries. Again I think it’s particularly delicious when eaten with a mashed up banana. Did I mention that I’ve really come to like bananas since I started living in this tropical region that has more banana varieties than I can count?
•Sweet Bread with curry. This is classic Sunday morning fare in Kerala. It’s regular bread, just very sweet. Usually bread is eaten with potato curry or some other vegetable curry.

Lunch - Around noon. Lunch is always rice. Rice forms the center of almost every meal in Kerala. (All the breakfast foods mentioned above are made with rice flour.) So lunch is a heaping plate of rice, with several curries. We have sambar as the main lunch curry almost every day. Side dishes can include:
•Fish curry. Probably my favorite curry in Kerala. Fish pieces are cooked and served in a thin red sauce. It’s made with lots of red chilies and garlic, so it’s very spicy, which is what makes it so good. It is also one of the most prominent Kerala dishes.
•Thoren. This amazing dish can be made with almost any vegetable. The vegetable is cut into small pieces and sautéed with coconut and chilies. It’s fabulous, and as a dry dish it adds great texture to the meal.
•Papadam. Small, salty, chip-like bread. You crush it into your rice and curry mixture, but beware: only crush one bite at a time otherwise it will get soggy sitting in the rice.
•Pickle. This is nothing like what we in the West call a pickle. In Kerala, pickle is a very spicy fruit preparation. Limes, lemons, mangos, etc can all be cut into tiny pieces and pickled with lots of chilies, salt, and vinegar. This is jarred and stored for some time. Then a jar will be opened up, and we’ll be eating lemon pickle with lunch for weeks. When you mix pickle with your rice it will generally overpower any other curry taste on your plate. After getting used to the taste, I’ve discovered that his can actually be a good thing.


[Picture of a Kerala Feast for lunch. Yes, it really is served on a banana leaf. the rice is surrounded by many different curries, banana cips, papadam,pickle etc. My first lunch in Kerala looked like this because we arrived on the day of the biggest festival in the state, Onam. We had lunch at a Hindu temple, where they served this meal to us and to the several thousand other guests at the temple for the festival.]

Tea - 4pm. Tea, or “chaia,” in Kerala means tea with lots of milk and sugar. I think it tastes like sweet milk with a little bit of tea flavor. Although I still prefer black tea, I’ve come to appreciate chaia more and more. With tea we usually eat a snack of some kind. This snack can be biscuits (something very much like Nilla Wafers) or bakery items like sweet buns or samosas or wada (a doughnut shaped bread with onions and chilies). I think the most common snack is banana fry, that is, bananas halved and dipped in appaam batter, then fried. It’s tasty but very oily.

Dinner - Around 8pm. Dinner is often also rice and curry, like at lunch, but it can also have some variation. Here are some other dinner foods:
•Chapatti. These are basically wheat flour tortillas that you tear and eat with different curries.
•Porotta. This rich flat bread is cooked with more oil than a chapatti. It tears in round pieces, and this bread is especially great for soaking up extra curry sauces. However, porotta is more of a special occasion food, whereas chapatti can be an everyday bread.


Although it took me some time to grow accustomed to Kerala’s cuisine, I have now fully embraced the food here. I have already bought a cookbook and am determined to learn to cook at least a few of these dishes before I leave. Because, even though I’ll be happy to eat less rice next year, I’m not sure if I’ll survive the year if I can’t eat fish curry every now and then.