Grocery Staples

[ZenSojourner]

Papad from scratch?

Enormous pain doesn't BEGIN to cover it, LOL! It's much worse than making idli or dosai the traditional way.

Here's a link describing the process briefly:

http://www.aayisrecipes.com/2008/06/...ddina-happala/

When she talks about uradgram, what she means is urad dahl, whole, with skins still on, brought to the household by tenant farmers in wooden barrels. Basically this is the raw bean picked straight off the plant.

That stone thing is a grinding mill for separating the urad from it's skin and crushing or splitting it. This had to be done by hand with that heavy heavy stone and a heavy piece of wood for pounding the urad. The separating is done by hand too.

This is sort of like having to harvest the wheat, separate the grain from the chaff, and then grind it. She was cleaning this stuff by hand and then paying someone to pound it and clean some more.

Even if you buy the urad already cleaned and split, it's still a huge pain to make papad. You still have to grind the stuff into a paste (that's what the second stone thing with the hand held stone thing on top of it is for), make the wafers, and spread them to dry in the sun. Here are some pictures of handmade papads drying in the sun:





They have machines to do all the cleaning, pounding, grinding, paste making, rolling out, and drying. For about $1 I can buy enough papads for a month. There is just no way I would even try this, LOL! This is the sort of thing that only worked when women slaved from dusk to dawn trying to take care of the household because it was that or starve. I can't tell you how much I admire the generations of women who did these sorts of onerous tasks, and more, to keep their families alive. Food preparation and storage was a daily task that could not be shirked because there was no grocery store to turn to when the (winter, monsoon, or other non-growing season) came.

Today we wouldn't want to do this anymore than we would want to take our clothes to the river and clean them by pounding on them with rocks.

They are a MUCH more enormous pain that bread making, LOL!

Early in my marriage I actually did consider making papad from scratch, because everything's better from scratch, right?

However my then-husband (now ex) dissuaded me from this notion rather rapidly. Having actually witnessed the huge amount of labor that goes into making papad, he pronounced himself MORE than happy with the store-bought stuff, as any negligible improvement in taste for having made it by hand was more than offset by the guilt he felt over the tremendous amount of work.

This from the man who insisted I should be ironing his underwear. If HE thought it was too much work, it was REALLY too much work, LOL!