ravum, on 25 March 2010 - 08:29 AM, said:
A knowledgeable post as usual Gautamda, what about the small brown desi chana - is it a variant of black desi chana?
How is sattu served? Have only used it as a stuffing for parathas.
Dear Ravum,
Sorry for the delay. The brown and black are the same breeding group and "market class", differing only in the amount and composition of some of the compounds present in the skin. You ask about sattu and I shall recapitulate my limited knowledge from the Bihar-Bengal interface. India certainly would have many more ways of using this product and I hope others will join in. Sattu here is the ancient Vedic shaktu, the very staff of life for the Aryans who composed the Rksamhita. References abound, too many to cite. BUT we all recognize AASHIRVAAD. What's that? TRAYA - AASHII =the 3 AAShiis, parched barley flour i.e. shaktu, ghee & yoghurt.
So, Ashirvad is the wish that the Three Ashi-s reside with you: the ultimate good eats of the Rgvedis, besides the occasional boiled horse, that was dispatched by strangling by the special class of Samaga priests, the SHAMITA, they who make silent!! Shaktu would be scattered around the PARIDIHI, the sacred perimeter cordoning off the yagashala. All within would receive a yajnabhAga, share of the sacrifice. You can gauge that the priests were muscular guys. It is not easy for one man to garotte the pick of the stallions in the tribe. Also, fires were started by the priests, two holding down the arani block, one manipulating the heavy bow drill that created the friction.
8 balls of barley shaktu mixed with water, each as large as a peacock’s egg [which is NOT large!]: that is the amount of food prescribed for a renunciant. I have known those who have taken that seriously and have gone on to great things. The present leaders of Hindu maths bulging with fat should reflect what their claims to spiritual leadership are, in the light of this injunction.
Tibetans survive on barley sattu, mixed with Tibetan style pu-erh tea. The fortunate have butter tea and mix this in with their sattu. Even more fortunate people add delicious yak butter at various stages of ripeness to the sattu, and wash it down with pho-cha. I love pho-cha! Try it made with the real brick tea.
We have spoken of the standard 1:3 barley:chickpea sattu that used to be popular in my youth, freshly roasted & ground each day. It was intoxicating in aroma and taste and you can see from the ratios, a complete food.
It was mixed with water, and consumed with oil pickles, raw onions, and green chilies. It created a VERY strong thirst & compelled you to seek out water, a very important survival mechanism for the rickshaw pullers and thelawallahs of Kolkata.
Some Bangalis settled in Bihar or the districts bordering Bihar had the innovative & delicious custom of taking that dough, masking it very soft, almost a liquid paste, and eating it with rice, vegetables and even dal, like another side. Very interesting, and not found in inner Bengal.
These Bangalis would love to thickly coat their MURI, murmura or puffed rice, with sattu, after it had been given the customary mustard oil dressing. Eaten with peanuts, chopped green chilies, some black salt, and occasionally bajjis, this also is a novel use of sattu.
Back to the dough: mixed with chopped oil pickle and/or green chili, the crowning glory would be its use as a stuffing for LITTI. A thick wheat flour dough ball stuffed with sattu dough roasted directly over cowdung patties may not sound like much, nor fit Western standards of haughty cuisine, but I would give much to taste once more the LITTI made by skilled hands: the fresh ground flour, the patient kneading, the cowdung created of a diet of leaves, straw and fodder and an entire universe just vanished in the twinkling of an eye. No ghee, no nothing, just littis for dinner.
In a little oil or ghee with cumin temper, you may fry minced onions or not, ginger-green chili or not, then whatever masala you need, then sattu, brown sugar. You make a dry filling to place, as you said, between parathas, or dalpuris. Filling for khasta kachori.
FRESH HOT SATTU in hot milk, as a gruel with bananas, brown sugar, a hint of cardaom. You can even try it in a sort of payasam, using just nutty chickpea sattu.
I wonder if you could sauté garlic, parley, basil, in EVOO, then chickpea sattu and use it to dress angel hair pasta or toss it with orzo? Of course, I am an uncivilized animal, and will enjoy any thing if it has sattu.
I find the concept of leaching bitter melons of bitterness self-defeating. If the nutraceutical property is in the bitter stuff, why throw it away and then cook the melon in a bunch of oil and rich stuff? The whole idea behind eating bitters is to give your liver and bile glands a break from rich food!! Sattu cuts the perception of bitterness. If you stuff bitter melon with a sattu and vegetable stuffing, like green beans, then you can cook the whole melon without extracting that bitterness or frying it. [ I wouldn’t know for certain!! like many Bangalis, I have a very strong liking for bitterness, conditioned from infancy.]
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