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Recipes
Kacca Channa
Kuram T Narayana
In the good old days, many of our readers may have travelled
on Southern expresss from Madras to Delhi. On the way, between Nagpur
and Itarsi tribal villagers take a free ride selling kacca channa and
Guava. The channa they sell is green and raw. They mildly heat the
channa (with a coal pot), add onions, green chillies, and nimbu.
During travel, the channa tastes excellent.
Improvising on such channa is difficult. But channa, when served
appropriately, goes excellently with beer, the divine drink of
our andhra gaarus. The touching taste of chillies, the crispness
of the onions, the mildly cooked brown channa, and the sourness
of fresh nimbu all make the beer go down the throat causing a
sublime ecstacy to our intellect.
Your Gastronomy Rao, after considerable experimentation, has perfected
the technique of making channa masaala of the Indian rail variety.
Note that channa means indian channa, not chick peas.
Here is the recipe.
Over night soak 4 cups of channa in water with two teaspoons of salt.
By morning, the channa must be tender by morning.
Take 4 cups of Red Onions and dice them for texture to about half cm
in length. Red onions look colorful.
Take about 20 small green chillies of indian variety. They must be
pretty hot. Slice them in to small pieces of the same size of the
onion.
Take about 8 Ripe Red chillies. Cut them into pieces as above. Note
that these are not dried chillies. They are kacca chillies.
Take about 20 jalapeno peppers. Jalapeno peppers in the grocery shops
are not at all hot. The attraction is that when cut to pieces, jalapeno's
maintain the crispness. That crispness is important when it touches the
teeth.
Mix all these three variety of chillies that have been diced nicely.
Get some fresh coriander leaves. Nicely cut into pieces the coriander.
One can choose as much quantity as desired.
Take 1 cm x 1 cm fresh root ginger. Cut it into tiny tiny pieces.
Mix the onions, chillies, ginger, and coriander together.
Preparation:
Take a frying pan. Make pOpu in the pan with mustard, jeera, dhaniya,
etc. Then add the channa to it without water. Add one tea spoon of
dhaniya powder. Mix thoroughly. Leave the channa for about 5 min. Allow
it to cook with whatever moisture is there. The channa will be mildly cooked.
One can taste that it is still raw.
Then on the heat add the onion, chillis, etc. and mix well.
Then take one or two fresh nimbus. Spread the juice on the channa.
Taste for salt. If you need salt, add a teason or so. Remove from
the heat. All this should not take more than 3 minutes.
In this process, the onion should not be cooked. The jalapeno peppers
and others should not loose their crispness.
Remove the dish, and distribute in cups with freshly spinkled onions,
chillies (jalapeno) and coriander.
That will be simply great.
Note that this not the north indian channa masaalaa.
...From the desk of Gastronomy Rao.
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