Puttu it down!

The cheapest restaurant in JB Nagar charges Rs.10 for a kutti of puttu. Rice flour is Rs.22/kg. 1kg makes 6 kutti puttu. So that’s a running expense of 3 rupees 60 paise per day, ignoring the cost of cooking gas, salt and the 5 minutes it takes to cook and clean. I have a modest but functional kitchen. So a puttu kutti, which comes at Rs.170, would be the only initial investment. That means I can break even in under a month. Not a bad investment. So I went out and bought myself a puttu kutti. My roommate’s response was something along the lines of, “Hope you don’t try to fry fish in it.”

I haven’t gotten that far, yet. But being me, I couldn’t resist the temptation to improvise and experiment a little. Getting coconut scrapes was a bit of a problem, so I made puttu without coconut. Not too bad. Even tried to replace the coconut scrapes with sprouted green gram, a sort of puttu biryani. I found packaged puttu podi to be unreasonably priced, so I shifted to regular rice flour. Then came ragi puttu, wheat puttu, rava puttu, johar puttu, bajra putu, corn puttu. Checked out almost every kind of flour available in the market and various combinations. Surprisingly enough, johar turned out to be rather good for puttu. Bajra and corn didn’t come out so well, but corn did have a promising cheesy flavor to it. As for wheat, it seems a lot depends on the kind of the flour. Too much gluten and you could end up with gothampunda instead of puttu. Then I discovered bran. A 7:3 mixture of rice flour and wheat bran turned out to be pretty neat, so I’ve stuck to it for some time now. Unfortunately, couldn’t find rice bran anywhere. If anyone out there knows where to get rice bran in Banaglore, please do lemme know.

Future plans include ambitious research into things like puttu pulav, rainbow puttu, keema puttu and flavoured puttu along the lines of soy sauce, Maggie cubes, vanilla etc. Meanwhile, I’m also considering the possibility of using the puttu kutti to steam some sweet corn. Maybe I’ll try that out this weekend. And if it works, I might consider steaming a few sardines too.