Suralichi Vadi/Steamed Chickpea Rolls

When I read Anupama's Suralichi Wadi entry for Nupur's Marathi cuisine series, my friend S and I felt that we could do it too!

Alas, though the recipe is extremely simple and made for very tasty wadis, it was almost a no go for us! Well, there are several things that may have gone wrong, the core one being us not taking some of the instructions seriously perhaps ;)? Our biggest hurdle was once we pressure cooked the chickpea flour mixture, the cooker just REFUSED to open up. It all started with us smelling something burning, where we quickly shut the gas off, but left the cooker on the hot plate based gas, so guess what, the heat kept going for a while :(

Then after several futile tries of getting the cooker to cool off and of course just open up, we gave up exhausted! Then S had the presence of mind to call the expert, aka her mom (visiting from India) to help figure out the mystery of the un-openable cooker lid...S's mom calmly assessed the situation, and in a way only moms can, somehow got the lid to open up and re-assured us that all was not lost! And how right she was ..If not for her, we would have thrown the whole thing out. But we did manage to retrieve the top unburnt, super tasty part of the steamed mix and roll out those incredible bites of joy :)

So the key issue we think caused the mini crisis was that there was less water in the cooker. And why would that happen you may ask....now therein lies the secret..we substituted the butter milk in Anumapa's recipe with yoghurt (well, we didn't have any buttermilk at hand now did we!) Now that may explain the lack of sufficient water maybe ;)?

Oh well, all is well that tastes and looks well. In our case we had both going for us after the initial panic attack. I surely want to try this again with buttermilk as apart from the cooker lid sticking part, the rest of the process was really simple!

We followed this recipe on Anupama's blog pretty much as is. The only other change we made other than the aforementioned buttermilk replacement, was we didn't fill the wadis with the coconut stuffing, but just sprinkled some fresh coconut on top after the tempering process. Do check out Anupama's version of the Suralichi wadi (also known as Khandvi in Gujrati), as hers look divine!

Enjoy :)