Chunchipatra pitha

This post owes both to Sweta Biswal and to Ritu Pattanaik apa, under whose remote and very generous tutelage I’ve learned to make and love these pithas. All inaccuracies in reportage, however, are entirely mine!

Think rice paper is just a South East Asian spring-roll-and-dumpling thing? Think again.

Here is the Odia Chunchipatra pitha, which is a quick, delicate little rice paper dessert stuffed with coconut and jaggery, though that’s not all it is. There’s no two-word way to translate “Chunchipatra pitha” into English, really. These have been on my mind for a long, long time, really ever since Sweta Biswal put them there. Two things fascinated me about this delicious little sweet offering: the use of doob grass or arugampul [Cynodon dactylon] as a paintbrush to spread an aromatic rice batter onto a hot stone, and the consonance of these pithas and what Andhras will know as pootharekulu, which are a commercial specialty of a town known as Atreyapuram, right on the banks of the East Godavari river, though some traditional homes in the region might have specialized in making these, too. Both are forms of rice paper, both are stuffed with coconut-jaggery fillings though pootharekalu will use dry fruits as well. A close cousin is the Uttara Kannada Havyaka community todedevu, made with a sugarcane juice-sweetened batter and no stuffing at all.

The “pitha” as a category deserves more attention than I know to give it (yet); as I understand it’s a “cake,” though said cake can be steamed (as with enduri pithas which are a kind of ilai-adai steamed in turmeric leaves), griddle-fried (as with chakuli pithas), or cooked over wood-fire stoves (as chenna poda pithas classically are) or deep fried (as with the Saptapuri pitha). Most Odia pithas are made as part of some ceremonial offering or other (muan pitha for Raja festival, the athirasam-like kakara pitha for Manabasa Gurubar, manda pitha for Durga Puja–though these are not exclusive associations); some are very specialized and specific (like the Saptapuri pitha, made only for ancestral homage on Saptapuri Ashtami) but pithas can be an everyday preparation, too. Both for ceremonies and for daily fare, each household will have its favorites and must-haves.

Thickness varies, too: chakulis are very dosa-like, but chunchipatra pitha is rice paper-thin. An attraction of both this and the poothareku is that the juicy brown filling shows through the sheer paper white, a seduction in rice if there ever was one. The see-through effect is proof, too, that the skin for the pitha is thin enough to call perfect!

Poothareku= “pootha” + “reku,” or a coating that becomes a sheet. You can see how masterfully these are prepared out of just thin rice batter in the video below. Some will use an inverted kadhai or wok–who says it’s only the inside of the wok that should be used to cook? The convex, inverted wok is the perfect surface for making rice paper, too.

In the same family, “Chunchipatra” is a conjugation of either “chincha” (to sprinkle) or “chunchi” (needle-like) + patra (leaf), so can mean either sprinkled with leaves or a pitha made with needle-leaves, which of course describes doob grass to a tee. Interestingly, I’m not sure if pootharekalu have any history of leaf-use in preparation, but these days small cotton handkerchiefs are used in place of doob to ‘sprinkle’ rice batter on a hot tava while making chunchipatra pithas. The Odisha border is far still from the centers of pootharekalu preparation, but there’s a good deal of cross-over between these cuisines, as is suggested in the form and method of this pitha’s preparation.

Likewise the todede [pl. todedevu]. Note the use of the banana leaf as an implement to spread the batter in that classic criss-cross shape:

The shapes are different: pootharekalu are rolled into cigars, while chunchipatra pitha are (as we shall see) folded into little squares, and todedevu go further to become triangles.

Pootharekalu and the classic inverted clay pot or iron-pan todedevu have been made into highly-skilled arts of the sort that might be hard to reproduce at home, but chinchipatra pitha was never so large and thus remains very much within the reach of a home-cook. You need:

• an aromatic rice to prepare the batter
• coconut, jaggery, ghee, and the typical flavorings to make the filling
• doob grass or a clean, thin handkerchief to spread the batter
• a hot stone–your dosa-kal will do just fine
• as with the chenna poda pitha if this can be made on an outdoor stove, then so much the better for that gorgeous smoky taste, but an indoor tava works just as well.

I loved collecting arugampul from the garden where it sometimes appears or just getting a bunch from the vendors outside any Vinayaka temple and using the needle-like leaves to fashion a paintbrush. The grass is a favorite offering to Vinayaka, both I think because elephants eat grass, and also because this was Nandi’s offering in the old story: Nandi hadn’t refereed a game of dice between Shiva and Paravati honestly enough, inviting Parvati’s ire and a curse which deformed him. Seeking forgiveness, the great Mother advised him to offer his most favorite thing to Ganapati and find absolution there, so Nandi offered the grass he so loved, and so since then do we.

But arugampul [doob, dūrvā, Cynodon dactylon, Bermuda grass] has a host of medicinal properties that make it attractive as a micro-ingredient-imparting brush in the making of chunchipatra pitha. It’s alkaline, so neutralizes an acidic stomach in juiced form and is thought of as a calcium-rich diuretic and general immunity-builder and body detoxer.

The two main tricks in getting chunchipatra pitha right are really making the batter thin enough (almost watery) and fashioning the doob grass into an effective enough paintbrush to spread said batter quickly and thinly–really it’s a shaking and a sprinkling (as the name “chincha” indicates) in much the manner of the sprinkling of the rice flour batter on the inverted kadais that make pootharekalu: it’s one pat, and remove. But then also–if you’ve made dosas you know this–the tava (or inverted kadai) has to be hot enough and greased enough to prevent sticking but not so greasy as will keep the rice batter from initially adhering.

I didn’t at all manage that level of skill, and found myself needing to paint over existing strokes in a way that my Amma always said never, ever to do with dosas, because that makes them thicker, less delicate. I have the swirling of dosa batter on a hot tava down, but the sprinkling of the thinnest layer of batter for the chunchipatra pitha remains a skill to perfect.

The skill of spreading pitha “skin” aside, I doubt the home-made chunchipatra pithas ever get a rice paper so thin you can hold it up and see through the way you can with poothareku rice paper. These pithas are therefore best eaten fresh and hot, when they’re crisp and the jaggery-coconut filling is beginning to soak into the rice paper exterior. Pootharekalu, by contrast, and todedevu are meant to keep: they’re boxed and sent in large numbers to far away places [and the women who make the famous melt-in-your-mouth rice sheets never reap rewards as much as the sweet-merchants commissioning them do].

Chunchipatra pitha

A simple, unusual, and utterly delicious stuffed rice paper "cake" from Odisha. “Chunchipatra” alludes both to the use of doob grass as also to the act of using the grass to sprinkle a thin rice batter on a hot stone to achieve a thin rice paper. This is then stuffed with a coconut jaggery filling and is best eaten hot for that melt-in-mouth effect! With thanks to Ritu Apa for the video showing the process, made just for me!

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Ingredients

  

• 1 cup aromatic raw rice such as gobindo bhog
• A pinch of salt
• 2 teaspoons ghee
• ½ cup jaggery or to taste
• 1 cup freshly grated coconut
• 2-3 cardamom pods, powdered
• 1 small bunch of arugampul/doob/durva grass; substitute with a thin handkerchief if the grass is unavailable.

Instructions

 

• Soak the rice for 2-3 hours, drain, and grind it with clean water into a smooth, thin batter. While grinding, add water ½ cup at a time to ensure that the rice grinds smoothly, and then thin the batter until it’s easily pourable, almost watery. Use about 2 cups of water total.
• Add salt, and set the batter aside.
• Prepare the filling by heating the ghee in a small pan, adding the jaggery (and mashing with the back of a wooden spoon until it’s dissolved) and then the coconut. Mix well and let this cook for a minute or two. Switch off the flame, and add the cardamom powder.
• Prepare the grass “brush” by tying the bunch together with some string and then trimming one end to form an even brush. Dip it into the rice batter to mix while you heat the tava.
• You can use a cheesecloth or thin handkerchief as a substitute for the grass: fold it to a width that you want so that you can dip in the batter and lift out straight to place and run over the tava. Don’t crumple it.
• Now heat a tava or other cast iron pan. Don’t grease it too much or the batter will slide and not stick as you spread it. If there’s too much grease, wipe it with a clean cloth.
• When the pan is hot but not smoking, use the grass to paint a criss-cross on the hot surface. It may take you a few tries to get this right, and do try not to paint over areas repeatedly or the resulting pitha will become too thick. Return the grass to the batter bowl.
• If you’re using a handkerchief, lift it straight out of the batter and slide it in the same criss-cross patten on the hot surface. Return the cloth to the batter bowl.
• The pitha’s edges will curl upwards slightly. Now put a spoonful or more of the filling in the center of the pitha and use the ends to fold into a square.
• Lift the pitha off the tava with a spatula and repeat with the remaining batter and filling.
• Serve these pithas hot, when they’re still nice and crunchy and the filling is warm and soaking through!

Video

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