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I am Akshay, a full-time Ph.D. student and part-time home chef currently living in Germany. I hail from a coastal village with coconut-lined sandy beaches, deltas with migratory birds and mangrove forests near Calicut, located in the green state of Kerala in the Malabar coast of Southwest India. (In Malayalam language, “Keralam” translates to “land of coconuts”). Besides coconut, the tropical landscape of Kerala is home to a wide variety of spices and particularly Black Pepper (native to Malabar coast), tropical vegetables and fruits, seafood, poultry and meat (yes, beef in India!). The cuisine has influences from Arab, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch though spice trade or colonial history. The combination of coconut in different forms (tender, milk, oil, powder, grated, dried, roasted, desiccated) and Kerala spices with vegetables, and particularly meat and seafood, is something that makes the cuisine stand out. As a not-very-dairy part of India, the use of milk products is rather limited in the cuisine. This offers a wide range of vegan options. Don’t get me wrong, there are many dishes that require no coconut at all that will be covered in this blog. In this blog, I would introduce you the wonders coconut and spices can do to your cooking style. Starting from mild coconut milk based stews to flavorful curries, thin Pathiri to Malabar Porota, egg rice to Malabar Biriyani, I would like to introduce you to this blog encompassing the Kerala cuisine in a nutshell. Let’s cook with coconut.
My introduction to cooking was very gradual, started with my mother in our kitchen at home. I grew up in a Malayali nuclear family with my parents and brother until I was 17, and later moved to different parts of India and world for education and job. While I was teenager enrolled (by default) in the Indian academic rat race, I spent sometime in the kitchen helping my mother to prepare dishes so that I could get to the coaching class before 7:30 in the morning, or in the evenings before dinner. My job was primarily chopping vegetables nicely, crush spices, slow roast coconut, sauté the things in pan, wait for the Nth whistle of the Indian pressure cooker to turn the stove off while I scrapped coconut flesh in the meantime, roll the thin Pathiri, prepare the Dosa batter in the Mixi, get some fresh curry leaves of chili in the garden, pluck a fresh mango from the balcony, deshell the mussels or whatever my mother asked for. There wasn’t a time I was told we making this particular dish, and you should learn on the go. However, it was the cooking strategies, combination of spices, the temporal ordering of things done to make the dish better, techniques for thickening or thinning the dish, ratio of right ingredients that I observed over the years, that shaped the cook in me. I am very thankful to my mother. Of course, I enjoyed the wonderful flavorful food.
Primarily, Cook with Coconut is aimed at popularizing the lesser-known Kerala cuisine in its original form to the rest of the world. You can find:
Recipes for Malabar/Kerala dishes (step-by-step guide)
Cooking techniques
Some ingredient combinations
which I gained or mastered over the past decade. However, if you happen to live in a part of the world with limited resources from the Indian subcontinent, I will try to provide alternative solutions you can use to succeed in your cooking endeavors.
