Tapioca Rice Vadaam

Vadaam is a sun-dried wafer that gets fried into a crispy accompaniment to rice. A century ago, hot tropical countries like India wasn’t blessed with a year-round bounty of vegetables. In the scorching hot summer months of April and May, everything wilts under the merciless eye of the Sun. So, our great grandmothers thought hard and came up with vadaams as tasty, crunchy substitutes for side-dishes that usually require vegetables. Vadaams are Indianized versions of chips that don’t require vegetables to make them. We do make plenty of vegetable chips too, though!

Vadaam is one of several forms of sun-dried food made in India. Some involve drying (and hence preserving) salted vegetables and fruits, while others involve drying out the moisture from starch - such as rice and tapioca. In South India, starchy foods are almost always available aplenty. So, we are adept at subjecting starch to every conceivable form of cooking. We cook them, pound them, grind them, dry them, bake them.... anything else I’m missing?

So, when the temperature soared to the 80s in my little town, I wondered if I should make vadaams too, for if I missed my opportunity this time, I would have to wait for a year to see the sun shining so merrily on us. Ever since this thought crept into my head in July, I planned to start the vadaam-making-process at the dawn of every weekend, but managed to entrap myself with other activities and projects. Finally, a week or so back, I put my foot down and decided that the vadaams shall be made, come hell or high water. I took down the recipe from my eager and enthusiastic mother-in-law, who by the way, is a huge patron of this blog! She is my most faithful reader and marketing agent for this little space - thank you so much, amma! :). Aside that, she is a great cook, who still does everything from first principles - including, vadaam making, thanks to my father-in-law’s knowledge and help.

The recipe she gave me sounded quite simple, so I geared myself and Anand to execute it.

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup of tapioca flour. I ground tapioca pearls in a coffee grinder and repeatedly sifted the coarse flour to get 1 cup of finely ground flour.
2. 7 cups of rice flour.
3. 16 cups of water
4. A huge piece of Hing soaked in warm water (or about 3-4 teaspoons of Hing. It may seem a lot, but Hing is a major flavoring. Besides, hing helps us stomach the starch).
5. 5-6 teaspoons of salt. Salt is always subject to individual preference, but this is a safe estimate, although it might seem like a lot. Remember, salt is a natural preservative.
6. 10 green chillies (or more depending on how spicy you like the vadaams. Our spice intake is mild, so 10 green chillies were just right for the 8 cups of flour).
7. The juice of 3 lemons (or more depending on how juicy the lemons are)
8. Strong arms to stir ;)
9. A few plastic sheets to lay out the wafers in the sun.

Preparing the Dough:

1. Mix the tapioca and rice flour.
2. Bring 16 cups of water to a boil in a deep, heavy bottomed vessel. I added a few spoons of sesame oil to the water to ensure the flour doesn’t stick too much to the bottom of the vessel. But I don’t think the oil made any difference!
3. Grind the green chillies and salt together (coffee grinder works). When the water comes to a boil, add this mixture and Hing, and stir well.
4. Next, slowly add the flour, simultaneously stirring to avoid lumps.
5. Once all the flour is added, reduce the heat to low and keep sirring (strong arms needed) until everything comes together as a glossy mass of dough. This was too much dough for me to successfully stir. So, Anand, grudgingly helped out :). (note to vadaam novices, start with half the measures)
6. Finally, switch off the heat. Add the juice of the three lemons and mix again.

Preparing the vadaams

1. Lay a few plastic sheets out in the sun. You can also use aluminium foil or wax paper - you basically need a material that won’t stick to the moist dough. Place paper weights, stones or bricks on the corners to avoid everything from taking off.
2. You need some kind of a press, with a hole at the bottom to squeeze out the dough to form patterns. We use a traditional murukku or thenguzhal press which looks like the bottom-right picture:

Moist vadaams on the left, dried vadaams on the right

One fills the lower part with the dough and then pushes down the lever-like press on top of the dough-filled part, and out comes the dough in a pattern that matches the template that has been fitted at the bottom of the press. We went with the “star - *” template - the wrong one for this kind of wafer apparently! But if you do decide to use this, squeeze out the dough in the form of short straight lines. The resulting shape will be like a squiggly line with little thorns sticking out - like a thin cactus. The right template to use is the one which has a bunch of concentric holes. Move/rotate the entire contraption as you press down on the lever, to form complex spirals of dough like the one in the picture.

Several such spirals will spew out from the numerous holes in the template. The vadaams will not expand in the heat, so you can squeeze out several such shapes close to each other. Refill the press with dough, press, draw squiggly spirals, and repeat. This is a tiring process. But it speeds up if you have handy-dandy helpers like Anand, who has actually done all this as a kid. He even used to sit and guard against crows and squirrels from tasting and devouring the vadaams. So, we took turns and finished forming the vadaams on the plastic sheet.

Typically, vadaams are left to dry and bake in the sun for about 8-10 hours everyday, for roughly 4 days, and sometimes even as long as a week. When the sun goes down, the sheets of vadaams are brought indoors, and if there is rain, they are left to dry under a fan...although fans are never effective and are just mitigating agents making sure the vadaams are not moist enough to go bad in the heat.

As per Murphy’s Law, the sun decided to hide behind the clouds when we finished squeezing out the vadaams. Within a couple of hours, it threatened to rain, and it did rain! Apparently I should have checked the weather more diligently before starting a full-blown ambitious project that is dependent on the weather! As Anand cursed and grumbled at me, I hit upon a rather obvious alternative - the oven! Sun gives heat, the oven gives heat too, right? So I tested one batch at 170 F in the oven (170 is the minimum temperature setting my oven allows - it corresponds to the “Warm” setting). I basically simulated the intensity of the Sun when it lashes over the Sahara desert in peak summer. The vadaams baked at this setting for 10 hours and they dried to a crisp, or so we thought. But I think the outsides baked faster than the insides. So I left the second batch in the oven for 10 hours at 170 F, and for 8 hours with the oven light on and the heat turned off.

This does go against the principle of energy conservation. But the weather decided to be murky the entire week, leaving me no choice. You will know the vadaams are fully dried if they are brittle and have no trace of white dough or moisture in them.


Frying
This is an easy enough step. Heat vegetable oil. When hot, drop in the vadaams and gently move it around encouraging it to expand. Do not wait till the vadaam turns golden-brown. Take them out when they have fully expanded in the oil and continue remaining creamish/off-white in color. Vadaams take just a few seconds to expand and fry in hot oil. So they are very quick to prepare. Make sure to reduce the heat of the oil after a few minutes of frying, for overheated oil makes burned, unevenly fried vadaams. My fried vadaams couldn’t retain their spiral shape because as they expanded in the heat, the tight, thorny spirals broke, resulting in pieces of fried vadaams. All because I used the wrong template on the press! They tasted good, so it was thankfully not a futile venture.

In principle, vadaams are easy to make. But keep in mind constraints like the weather and the other mistakes I did, and you will end up with a blunder-free experience!