Cuisine of Kerala

Rice Main Course of Food
The essential ingredient of the daily diet is rice. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, it is some rice preparation or the other, served along with a variety of fish. Fish is consumed in a variety of ways – it is preserved after being dried and salted or cooked in a delicious coconut gravy. Prawns, shrimps and crustaceans constitute some of the other famous delicacies.

Morning Meals
After the morning dose of coffee, a typical Malayali household serves breakfast that may either consist of soft idlis, prepared out of a paste of fermented rice and black pulses, or dosa, an oval spread of the same ingredients. Well-seasoned appams or periappams, made by mixing this paste with tomatoes, onions and other handy vegetables, are some of the other morning culinary delights.

Midday Meals
Midday meals consist of boiled rice that may be mixed with moru (curd or bitter milk) or rasam (thin clear pepper water or soup) and a range of vegetables. Pachadi is a delicious dish, cooked out of tiny pieces of mango, mixed with hot spices. Sambar, pulses prepared with vegetables is a standard daily fare. Thoran, a coconut-based dry fish dish that is mixed with minutely chopped vegetables, herbs and curry leaves, and similar to avial, which is cooked in a sauce, is another delectable dish. Pappaddakams, or crunchy round flakes made of rice flour, chutneys (a kind of sauce) and pickles, are scrumptious additions without which a meal is incomplete.

Wheat preparations are more popular in Muslim establishments. Well-prepared spirals called barottas and pathiris are made from refined flour, fried in oil and served with vegetables and curries. Chappathi, poori (a sort of baked or deep fried equivalent of bread) may be cooked optionally.

Diverse Use of Ingredients
A melange of aromas resulting from the free use of pepper, cardamom, cloves, turmeric, ginger, chillies, and mustard, used in most curries, fill the kitchens of the well-to-do, but generally the poorer folks content themselves with kanji (rice with water) and take fish with tapioca. Most dishes in Kerala are cooked in coconut oil and are incomplete without a mandatory use of coconut in some form or the other.

Kerala Snacks
Kerala is equally famous for traditionally homemade snacks a variety of banana chips, and rice flour cookies, are served with evening coffee