YELLOW-RICE

YELLOW-RICE How to Prepare -Make -Cook ?

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YELLOW-RICE Recipe

Sometimes a made-up dish is just called by its colour, as in this case. But the original recipe was the simple one of adding haldi to the rice in cooking, after it has been fried. If the dish is meant to be sweet, then the yellow comes from adding kesar, a very expensive and fragrant colouring ingredient.

Yellow-rice can be made either with one of the curry powders, or with seasoning and haldi. Each has a distinctive taste. It is also made with mixed dals. You can make your choice. One elaborate recipe developed from the original, is this one:

1 ½ cups rice ¼ teaspoon jeera
2 green chillies ¼ teaspoon mustard seed
Salt Ghee or butter
3-4 peppercorns A large pinch of haldi
1 teaspoon of til seed A little coconut flower
1 teaspoon of udith-dal (optional)
Lemon

Fry and cook the rice as before. Add the lemon juice and keep covered. Fry the mustard, udith and green chillies cut lengthwise, and in this seasoning mix the rice, stirring it well. The jeera can go in the seasoning or in the rice. The coconut flower can go in now or when you are about to remove it all from the heat. All this has to be done on a very low heat after the seasoning is ready. The rice grains will still remain separate and absorb the ingredients without getting mushy. The til is put in slightly browned, at the end, or it can go into the rice earlier. But it always tastes better if browned. In fact, for all made-up rice dishes, the slogan can easily be that the ingredients are “better if browned” (if not fried) in butter. That is easy to remember.

Variations

(a) Add some chana-dal roasted separately and put into the coked rice. It can also go in earlier and be cooked, and then it will be as soft as the rice itself.
(b) It is customary to add a little lemon juice on the served plate as well, particularly if the coconut has been omitted.
(c) Red chillies instead of green chillies. In either case you could scoop out the seeds if you are cooking for new eaters.

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