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Recipe: Shashi Tharoor's Idlis

By SUNITA KOHLI
March 07, 2024

Photograph: Kind courtesy: Shashi Tharoor/X

Everyone knows a good recipe to make idlis.

But how can you serve up these soft, steamed rice cakes absolutely flawlessly? By offering them with great sides -- be it the coconut, tamarind or peanut chutneys. Or the sambar or mulgapodi (gunpowder).

In Sunita Kohli's The India Cookbook, Shashi Tharoor -- former UN diplomat, three-term MP from Thiruvanathapuram and prolific author -- offers his best tips for creating idlis. To give the South Indian staple an interesting flavour, he suggests adding ajwain seeds or jeera seeds or methi seeds into the batter.

Tharoor loves his idlis. He has said on Twitter before: 'Idlis are the most nutritious, energy-giving food for Indian vegetarians. My personal batteries are charged entirely by my morning idlis'. 

Photograph: Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters

Shashi's Idlis

Serves: 4-6

Ingredients

Method

Sunita's Note: "You may scale up this recipe by increasing quantities of both in a 2:1 ratio.

"The perfect idli is soft, fluffy, slightly sour, melts in your mouth. Flavour comes from the accompaniments -- coconut chutney, gunpowder with melted ghee and my own favourite, a paste called ulli samandhi made by grinding small onions or shallots with red chillies and salt and just a dash of tamarind and roasting the mixture."

Editor's Note: To make sambar try Divya Nair's recipe for Traditional Sambar like my Amma's.

Sunita Kohli is a New Delhi designer, architect and socialite. Her book is a collection of ecclectic recipes from homes she has dined at in the capital. Do have a look at P Chidambaram and his wife Nalini Chidambaram's recipe for Crab Masala. This recipe was excerpted with the kind permission of the publishers, Aleph Book Company from The India Cookbook: from The Tables Of My Friends, selected and edited by Sunita Kohli. 

SUNITA KOHLI

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