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Recipe: Keep Your Cool – Spiced Buttermilk & Homemade Yoghurt

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I must have yoghurt with every single meal – a meal is never complete without it, and I am never full! I have tried over the years to go vegan and all that jazz but my love for yoghurt makes this impossible. I can give up milk, but yoghurt? Never. In fact, I loved it so much as a child that my mother had to ration it – she restricted me to a single cup per meal. But how I loved that one cup!

In South India, we take our yoghurt seriously. It has to be perfect – it should not be too sour, it should not have a thin film on top, and it should be smooth not broken. This is how it must be served at the table – and you can be assured that it is served at every table.

I have a friend in Barcelona who visits me each year and takes back a little bit of the yoghurt culture as a starter to make her own. The temperature, quantity of culture and the quality of the milk are very important. Yet, somehow, yoghurt is also very simple to make, which is why it is made in households every single day without fail. I wish sourdough was as easy to make. If you follow me on Instagram, you’d have seen my attempts and adventures at sourdough on my Instastories!

Traditionally, in my home, we set the yoghurt in an earthenware or stoneware pot. I set it both in the mornings and in the evenings, so that we have it fresh at both lunch and dinner. Yoghurt usually sours within a day, so it is one of the ingredients that is often used in leftover-based dishes. Refrigeration can prolong this slightly.

It sets faster in the summers, within 5 to 6 hours. In cooler months, if you set it just before bed, you will certainly be able to have it first thing in the morning. But be warned that these standards are for my climate, here in India. When I visited my son in New York last winter, he had a craving for homemade yoghurt. In the depths of icy November, it took two whole days to set!

So many of my summer stories revolve around my grandparents’ home in Vijayawada. If you went down memory lane with me and my aunt’s rose sherbet or their vetiver-scented curtains which inspired my chia pudding, here is one more from my childhood memories to enjoy: spiced buttermilk. It is a flavour I remember from those summers with my cousins, when we would each be given 25 paisa to go buy ourselves a treat. Someone would get soda, someone would get raw mango slices… My favourite was guava, but buttermilk was what we were always encouraged to have, for its health benefits. What I’ll share with you today is my friend Anandhi’s recipe, made with her guidance. Its core ingredient is homemade yoghurt.

Both yoghurt and buttermilk are great for digestion, and have a cooling effect on the body, which is why they are summer essentials. If you love your dairy like I do – with apologies to my vegan and lactose-intolerant friends! – you’ll absolutely love being able to switch from store-bought yoghurt. After a while, setting it becomes a habit, and it’s always so delicious when it’s fresh.

 

Spiced Buttermilk

(Yield: Approximately 5 glasses)

 

Ingredients

1 cup yoghurt

1 teaspoon roasted cumin powder

1 teaspoon grated ginger

1 tablespoon finely chopped coriander leaves

1 finely chopped green chilli

Salt to taste

3 cups water

A dash of lemon

1 pinch asafoetida (optional)

In a blender, add all the ingredients, except the water, and whir until everything is well blended. Now add the 3 cups of water. You can adjust the consistency by increasing or reducing the quantity of water to your preference. The dash of lemon gives you a little spring of energy, and the spices add such delicious flavours to the drink. Serve immediately.

Known for its probiotic properties, buttermilk acts as a coolant in the summer months, especially when eating heat-inducing mangoes is a full time pleasure!

 

 

Homemade Yoghurt

As I said earlier, setting yoghurt is both very delicate and very easy. To set the yoghurt, the temperature of the room, the temperature of the milk and the quantity of the starter are all very important in order for the yoghurt to be plain and not sour.

In India, where summers are very hot, I add a ¼ teaspoon of starter yoghurt to a bowl and pour room temperature milk into it. I then cover it with a lid and set it aside for 5-6 hours. Do the same if you are working in a similar climate. After the stated time, open the lid and see that the milk is set and rather tight when moved a little. Now refrigerate. Serve whenever you please.

During the winters, warm the milk and increase the quantity of the starter to ½ or even 1 teaspoon. Cover, and keep in a warm place for 10-12 hours or until set.

I am not a fan of sour yoghurt so refrigerating it once set is key, so it stays fresh for longer.

I’d much rather make my own yoghurt at home, where I know what exactly goes into it, as I’m always cautious about my food as far as possible.

This is the yoghurt I use when making buttermilk, as well as my regular accompaniment to my major meals. Yoghurt with rice, yoghurt with rotli, and of course, yoghurt with re:store’s bestselling muesli. It goes so well with everything, in my opinion!

I’d love to hear in the comments about how you’re keeping cool this summer!

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Recipe: Second Helpings – Gujarati Masala Curd Rice

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I hope you’ve been enjoying this series on traditional dishes made from leftovers (please see Part 1 and Part 2, if you haven’t already). To recap: in the absence of refrigeration, and because of the need to conserve resources, many cuisines in India and elsewhere developed sub-genres. These culinary sub-genres make use of extras either prepared during the initial cooking, or kept aside after the meal. Using these leftovers, a new dish is prepared. Fridges are really quite new for most of India. I remember visiting my grandparents’ home in Vijayawada one summer when they had purchased a huge fridge. It was such a novelty that neighbours would visit just to see the machine. Besides, not wasting food has long been considered a cultural virtue.

Today, the recipe I want to share with you is a classic go-to dish: masala curd rice, made in my mother’s Gujarati style. It was a staple in my house for Sunday dinner while I was growing up. This was because we had school the next day, and our mother would be busy helping us with our homework. In those days, we had no help at home, so our dad taught us how to iron our own uniforms and polish our own shoes. These tasks would keep us occupied on Sundays as we prepared for the school week ahead. By the time dinner came, we were usually too tired to think much. So we never minded the unfussiness of the meal. And mom, of course, was always relieved to make this easy dish.

Leftover rice is something that lends itself easily to a variety of dishes. For instance, there are theplas, which you may remember from this post on Indian breads. There are also muthias, which are made by adding flour and spices to the rice, rolling them and steaming them.

South Indians have their own methods too, including their own curd rice (known as thayirsadam), as well as pazhayachoru, in which rice is fermented overnight with a green chilli in it. This was originally a staple among farmers, who started their days early and needed to have a meal ready in the morning. You may be surprised to know that it is very healthy. The American Nutrition Association in fact recommends rice soaked the previous day as the best breakfast, with a host of benefits for the health including increased energy, decreased hypertension and good digestion.

This Gujarati Masala Curd Rice is yoghurt-based, which means that it is of course rich in probiotics and excellent for digestion. The spices used are available in literally every kitchen cabinet in India.

 

Gujarati Masala Curd Rice

(Yield: 1 ½ cups)

Ingredients

1 cup cooked rice

½ cup yoghurt

1 tsp chickpea flour

Salt to taste

1 dried red chilli (not too spicy)

A few curry leaves

¼ teaspoon turmeric powder

½ teaspoon coriander/cumin powder

Asafoetida (optional)

2 teaspoon oil

¼ teaspoon cumin seeds

¼ teaspoon mustard seeds

Remember: the key to the dishes in this Second Helpings series is their simplicity. This one in particular is so simple, yet so filling.

In a pot, add the oil and once it’s hot, add the cumin and mustard seeds. Wait till they splutter, and then add the red chilli and curry leaves. Immediately after, add the yoghurt and flour and stir so that the yoghurt does not split. Now, add all the remaining ingredients and stir.

Garnish with coriander leaves and serve hot. Gujarati Masala Curd Rice is a meal in itself, and is both flavourful and cooling. Ideal for summers, for light evening meals following afternoon feasts and as comfort food in general.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this Second Helpings series. I’d love to hear from you in the comments below about the dishes you make, or remember eating as you grew up, that fall into the resourceful, innovative category of “leftovers”. I’m sure your parents were so excellent at whipping up what seemed like a whole new dish that you didn’t always know that that’s actually what they were!

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Recipe: Lavender Shrikhand – A Little Lavender & A Lot Of Love

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Being born and brought up in Chennai into a traditional Gujarati home has given me a more expansive way of thinking, which is what opens one’s mind to explore. There are times when I think in Tamil while I’m cooking Gujarati food! Even as the world becomes a smaller place, I love keeping local culinary customs alive – but every once in a while, my imagination will take me on an adventure in the kitchen. So it was while making shrikhand one day, a sweetened Gujarati dish made of hung curd. I’d played with various Indian flavours for shrikhand before, including mango and an almond-saffron blend. But I had just met with a friend, Siddharth Murthy, who has an organic lavender farm outside Melbourne in Australia, and he had gifted me one of my favourite foreign ingredients. Next to rose, lavender is the scent I enjoy adding most to my cakes. I wondered: how would my family like to end a meal on lavender shrikhand?

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