Appam with chicken curry, or cooking with comparative advantage

Every easter and christmas my grandmother would make appams with a coconut milk based curry, typically chicken curry, usually for breakfast. It was one of my favorite meals of the year. One of the things that unintentionally made it exciting though was the the extent to which it was something of a high wire act, and the appams were always so close to disaster. The problem is the texture - it’s soft and pillowy in the center of the the concave “inside” but crisp on the outside, with a lacy crisp edge. You make it by dropping your batter in a pan that’s rather like a wok - interestingly called a “chin chatta” - a chinese pan - swirling a leavened batter around in it and letting the batter drip to the center of the pan. The pool in the middle where the batter collects is soft and bubbly, the batter that doesn’t drip down forms the lacy crisp edge of the appam. So for this to work, the batter has to stick to the pan… too much oil making the pan too slick and the batter all slides down to the middle. To little oil, or too sticky a batter, or an inadequately seasoned pan - the edges stick to the pan alright, they just refuse to leave. The appams rip, and once they start to stick to the pan every successive one sticks worse…

This is not even to mention the leavening. Traditionally appams are leavened with the natural yeasts in “toddy”, the sap of the toddy palm. Adding partly fermented toddy to the (primarily rice based) batter adds yeast, but also sugar, alcohol, water, flavor. Replacing the toddy with yeast was always a bit of an experiment. Kids creeping around the house searching for christmas presents and such were as likely to find an explosion of appam batter overflowing its container as to find an adult desperately trying to coax an under-risen batter to life.

So - what’s my secret to making appams here and recreating the magic of my youth? I don’t. I buy frozen appams from the indian grocery store, microwave and then pan fry the appams to crisp them up. Appams are hard! A factory in India is much better suited to making them than I am. I can make a bomb chicken curry though - my memory of chicken curry made real. After experimenting with 3 different recipes, I’ve worked out the one that I like best.

I learned this approach from Tyler Cowen, who uses good economics to eat well. Focus on the things that you can do uniquely well, get other people and systems to do what they do well. For example, I used to make Neapolitan style pizza, but now that it’s easily available from stores that specialize in keeping a woodfired oven at 900F and using it well, I don’t bother. When I do make pizza it’s pear and blue cheese, or peach, something I’m not likely to get someone else to do.

(Image: This image was originally posted to Flickr by Devika_smile at https://flickr.com/photos/75531279@N05/9191503698)