Farali cooking questionsફરાળી રસોઈના સવાલ
On a fasting day the kitchen runs on different rules — different flours, a different salt, a different vaghar. These are the questions from those days: what sticks, what falls apart, and what keeps until evening. What a household eats on a fast varies by family and by community; this page is only about the cooking.
Rajgara, singoda, samo — which farali flour is for what?
Rajgara flour is what most homes use for rotli and thepla, singoda for puri and for blending, and samo or moraiyo flour for thick rotla and for sheero. None of the three has gluten, so the dough never turns stretchy the way wheat atta does, and that is exactly why it tears when you roll it. Rajgara is the finest of them, slightly earthy, drinks water quickly and gives the softest dough. Singoda is paler and faintly sweet with a grainier bite; used alone it fries up hard and snaps, so many families mix it with rajgara, either half and half or two parts rajgara to one part singoda. Samo and moraiyo are, in most Gujarati kitchens, names for the same grain, moraiyo usually being the finer broken form, though the names shift from region to region. The common mistake is keeping these flours for months. They carry oil and go rancid, so if the tin smells sharp, throw it out. Which flours a household uses on a fast varies by family and community.
Why sendha namak on farali days instead of ordinary salt?
Sendha namak is the salt most Gujarati families keep for farali days, because farali cooking generally leaves out refined and processed kitchen items and sendha namak is rock salt in close to its natural form. That is the custom in many homes, but it varies by family and by community, and no one household's practice is the rule for another. What matters at the stove is that it behaves differently from table salt. The crystals are coarse, so a spoonful of sendha namak is less salty than a spoonful of fine salt — measure by taste rather than by the spoon, or pound it fine in a khandani first. It also dissolves slowly, so add it early, into the potato or the soaked sabudana, and not at the end, or you will bite into grains. In humid weather it cakes solid, so keep it in a glass jar with a tight lid, away from the steam of the stove. The usual mistake is adding it by count and then finding the whole dish tastes flat.
My farali dough will not bind and the pattice break apart. What now?
Boiled potato is the binder that works, roughly one medium potato — boiled, cooled and mashed — to one cup of rajgara or singoda flour. These flours have no gluten, so nothing in the dough holds it together along a fold; the potato starch does that job, and hot water does some of it too if you knead the flour with water just off the boil. Rest the dough ten to fifteen minutes before rolling, roll it thicker than a wheat rotli, and roll on a greased sheet of polythene rather than a dry board. For farali pattice the opposite problem applies, which is water. Boil the potatoes in as little water as you can, cool them completely before mashing, and salt them only at the end, because salt pulls water out and the mixture slackens. A tablespoon or two of singoda flour binds three potatoes; shape them and leave the patties in the fridge for twenty minutes. Then fry in properly hot oil. Lukewarm oil is what makes them drink oil and fall apart.
Sabudana stays hard in the middle or turns to glue — how do I soak it?
Rinse first, then soak in water that only just covers the pearls — about three quarters of a cup of water to one cup of medium sabudana — for four to five hours or overnight. Wash through three or four changes of water until it runs clear, because the loose starch on the surface of the pearls is what turns khichdi into glue. Too much water and the pearls swell, split and go pasty. Too little and you get a hard white centre that no amount of cooking will fix. The test is to press one pearl between two fingernails: it should flatten right through with no opaque dot in the middle. Drain off any standing water, leave the sabudana twenty minutes in the colander, then fluff it with a fork. Timing depends on the pearl — the tiny nylon sort needs an hour or two, the large ones longer. In the pan, cook on medium, fold rather than stir, and keep the lid off once the pearls turn glassy.
Which farali dishes will keep for a whole day?
The dry ones keep. Sukhdi or gol papdi, farali chevdo, roasted peanuts and dry wafers will sit in a steel dabba through the day and into the next, and rajgara thepla rubbed with ghee stay soft for a day. Anything with boiled potato in it is on a shorter clock: sabudana khichdi, pattice and potato shaak are best eaten within four or five hours in Gujarat weather, and should not stand covered on the platform all afternoon in the warm months. Dahi, milk and fresh coconut are the first things to turn, so if the food has to travel, leave them out and carry chutney or lemon in a separate dabbi. Pack fried things loosely in steel, never in a plastic bag, and never close the box while the food is warm, because the trapped steam softens the crust and that condensation is what spoils it. Fill the dabba only once everything has cooled, and keep sweet and savoury apart so the sukhdi does not pick up chilli.
How do I get flavour into a farali shaak without onion and garlic?
Build the flavour in the vaghar and at the end, since the middle of the dish is where onion and garlic usually sit. Onion gives sweetness and body, garlic gives the sharp edge, and without them you replace each separately. Let jeera darken properly in hot ghee until it smells toasted, not just until it crackles, because that browning is the only browning the dish is going to get. Ginger and green chilli pounded together go in next and do the sharp work. For body, a quarter cup of coarsely ground roasted peanut stirred into a potato shaak or a khichdi gives it the weight onion would have given. A small pinch of sugar, or a spoon of fresh coconut, covers the sweetness. Then finish off the heat with lemon and a handful of coriander, because acid at the end is what makes a bland dish taste finished. Ghee rather than oil for the vaghar makes a real difference here. The common mistake is loading in more chilli to compensate; you get heat, not flavour.
Why is peanut used so much in farali cooking, and how should it be ground?
Peanut does three jobs in farali cooking: it brings fat, it brings body, and ground coarse it keeps sabudana pearls from sticking to each other. On ordinary days dal and besan give a Gujarati plate its savoury weight, and on a fasting day peanut stands in for them. The working figure is about a quarter cup of coarsely ground roasted peanut to one cup of soaked sabudana, and a couple of spoons stirred into a potato shaak. Roast the peanuts dry on a low flame for eight to ten minutes, until the skins crack and a few go dark, then cool them completely before grinding. Hot peanuts turn oily and clump in the jar. Pulse in short bursts to a coarse, sandy powder; keep going and you have peanut butter and the khichdi will be sticky. If someone at the table does not eat peanut, coarsely crushed roasted makhana or roasted sesame gives some of the same body, though not the same fat.
What is usually kept aside in the kitchen on a fasting day?
In most Gujarati households, farali cooking leaves out the grains — wheat, rice, jowar, bajri — along with dal and legumes including besan, ordinary table salt, and onion and garlic. Many families also skip turmeric, hing, mustard seeds and ready masala mixes, and some skip tomato. Beyond that the lists diverge a great deal. Some homes eat dahi and milk freely on a fast and some keep the day dry; some cook with jeera and black pepper, others with neither. Practice varies by family and by community, and the only reliable guide is what is done in your own house. Nothing here is a ruling on what is permitted or forbidden. One practical point catches people out, and it is the flour. A neighbourhood mill that grinds wheat all week also grinds rajgara, so households that keep the two apart buy sealed packets or ask for the machine to be cleaned. The same thinking applies to the oil tin, the masala dabba and the spoons.
Two people at home are fasting and the rest are not. How do I cook once?
Cook the farali dish as the centre of the meal and put the ordinary food around it, rather than cooking two separate meals. A sabudana khichdi or rajgara thepla with a potato shaak feeds everybody; set out rotli, dal and bhat alongside for those who are not fasting, and nobody feels they are eating a special diet. If your household keeps the two sets of food apart, the order matters more than the menu: cook and serve the farali portion first, with its own ladle and its own corner of the platform, before the wheat and the dal come out. Keep separate spoons in the two dabbas. For taste, the gap is usually sharpness rather than substance, so put a hot green chutney, cut lemon and the regular masala on the table instead of changing the pot. Count about half again as much food as usual, because a farali plate fills people less than dal-bhat does. Practice varies from home to home.
How do I cook farali food so the plate is not so heavy?
Change the cooking method before you change the menu, because the weight in a farali plate is mostly oil and ghee and that is the part you control. Deep-fried puri, fried pattice and wafers all sit in the oil; the same potato, sliced and roasted dry on a tavi with one spoon of ghee, is a different plate altogether. Steam the sabudana vada mixture as muthiya instead of frying it, and make moraiyo khichdi rather than puri the main dish, since boiled grain absorbs no oil at all. Cut the peanut powder roughly in half, from a quarter cup to an eighth per cup of sabudana, and let dahi, lemon and coriander carry the flavour instead. Serve one fried item on the thali, not three. This is about the cooking and not about anybody's health. How a particular food sits with a particular person is a question for a doctor, and nothing here is advice on that.