After a long gap, I am here with another Cooking Basics post. I love to make variety of puttu and instead of buying puttu flour, I make it at home. It is the only way you can get perfectly delicious puttu. My mum used to make all types of flour at home and I was her helper. She used to refer me as her right hand. From the age of 12, I started cooking and used to help mum in each and every preparation. Do you think I enjoyed it? Absolutely not. I hated working in kitchen and wanted to go out and play with friends but now when I look back, what an experience I got with mum! I don’t know whether I can give it to my daughter but cooking always reminds me of my mum. As I do cooking daily, not a single day has passed without thinking about her in these two and a half years. Today when I was roasting the puttu flour, I so much remembered her. It is painful yet somehow nice to think of her.
I used cholam/ Jowar today to make the puttu flour. Millets are lot more healthier than rice and I am happy that I am including them a lot in our diet. As we get jowar rice, it is very easy to make this flour. Just use it instead of rice. This flour is very versatile. You can make puttu, kozhukattai, paal kozhukattai, murukku and roti with this. Learn this and you will surely thank me.
This is the jowar rice. Wash and soak this for 3-4 hours.
Drain in a sieve. Allow it to air dry for some time. I just left it for 30 minutes. You can also spread it on a cloth so that the cloth absorbs the extra water.
Transfer to a mixer jar.
Grind until smooth powder is formed.
Transfer the flour to a kadai. I love to use my aluminium kadai. It is better not to use non stick.
Roast the flour until it is completely dry. This is the most daunting step in the whole preparation. You should not leave the flour unattended even for 10 seconds. Else it will urn at the bottom. While preparing this my mum and me usually take turns so that my hands won’t ache too much. But still I used to hate this part. When you rub the flour with your hand, you should feel like touching dry sand. If there is even a drop of moisture in the flour, it will spoil. So be careful. Keep flame medium while roasting.
Sift the flour in a sieve.
Transfer the remaining lumps to the mixer jar and grind again. Sift it again until very little flour remains in the sieve. You can discard it.
Allow the flour to cool completely before storing it in an airtight box.
Other puttu flours in the blog:
A very informative post. I haven’t seen jowar rice anywhere here. Should explore more.