Kerala & the Malabar Coast · Dessert
Ada Pradhaman
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a sweet edge rounding the corners, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 150 g rice ada
- 400 g dark jaggery (sharkara), chopped
- 100 ml water
- 700 ml thin coconut milk (second and third pressings)
- 350 ml thick coconut milk (first pressing)
- 60 g ghee
- 60 g fresh coconut, in thin chips
- 30 g cashews
- 20 g raisins
- 1/2 tsp green cardamom, ground
- 1/4 tsp dried ginger (chukku), ground
- 1 pinch cumin, ground
- 1 pinch salt
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · nuts
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Pour boiling water over the ada and leave it until the pieces are pliable and fall apart from each other, then drain and rinse under cold water so they stop sticking.
- Melt the jaggery with the water, strain the syrup through a sieve to leave the grit behind, then reduce it until it just threads off the back of a spoon.
- Fry the coconut chips, cashews and raisins in the ghee until the chips are amber and the raisins puff, and lift them out, leaving the ghee in the pan.
- Toss the drained ada in that ghee for two minutes, add the jaggery syrup and the thin coconut milk, and simmer, stirring often, until the ada turns translucent and the payasam coats a spoon and darkens to old bronze.
- Off the heat, stir in the thick coconut milk, cardamom, dried ginger, cumin and salt, then the fried coconut and nuts; it should still pour.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Demi-sec Champagne
- Also Right
- Off-dry Chenin (Vouvray)
- From the Taps
- Fruited sour
- Zero-Proof
- Coconut water with lime
Tropical sweetness wants bubbles or Chenin’s honeyed acid: richness met with lift, not more weight.
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