How avakaya is made
Hard mangoes, a sharp knife and three weeks of patience.
How we roast and grind kandi podi
Toor dal, red chillies and garlic in an iron kadai: a morning on the podi side of our kitchen.
Pickles are made in summer, but podi is made every week of the year, usually on Tuesday and Friday mornings. A podi loses its smell after about three months, so we make it in small batches of around 8 kg and never keep stock for long.
Kandi podi starts with toor dal. Lakshmi roasts it on a low flame in a wide iron kadai, stirring all the time with a flat wooden spoon, until the dal is golden and smells nutty. That takes about 25 minutes for a 3 kg lot and cannot be hurried; dal roasted on high heat browns outside and stays raw inside, and the podi tastes floury. A small handful of chana dal is roasted with it for crunch.
Next come Guntur red chillies, roasted separately for just a few minutes until they turn crisp, then cumin and a little dry coconut. Garlic is peeled and dry-roasted until the edges brown. Everything is spread on steel plates to cool completely, because grinding warm dal releases moisture and the podi turns lumpy.
The grinding is done in two stages in our mill, coarse first and then a second, shorter pass, so the podi stays slightly grainy. Salt goes in at the end. Before the batch is packed into jars, three of us taste it with hot rice and a spoon of ghee. Each jar carries the date it was ground, and kandi podi at ₹180 for 200 g is best used within three months.
