310) HARSHALE POVU

HARSHÀLÉ POVU

BANANA, BEATEN RICE AND COCONUT MILK

A MASTERPIECE OF A KONKANI DRINK

Feeling tired, stressed and grumpy after a sweltering midsummer day’s hard work? This is the energy health drink for you! Delicious and gladdening, energizing and elevating, harshàlé povu will cheer you up no end!

To make delicious harshale povu, you can use any of these little, yellow skinned bananas – poovan / rasthali / rasbale / yelakki / jnalipoovan / adakkapoovan / Mysore poovan / palayankodan / charapoovan / karpooravalli / kadali / amritapani / sonkeli. However, robusta varieties are not used traditionally.

Ingredients:

     1)    Fully ripe, small, yellow-skinned banana (see above) – 500 gm.

     2)    Coconut milk – 750 ml. (see tip)

     3)    Beaten rice flakes (thin flakes are tastier) – 50 gm.

     4)    Jaggery (unrefined cane sugar) – 210 gm.

     5)    Cardamom – 3 pods

     6)    Water – 50 ml.

To make:

          Peel the bananas, chop neatly to superfine pieces and set aside. Shell the cardamom, crush the seeds to powder and set aside. Put the jaggery together with 50 ml. of water in a pan and set on low heat. Stir till the jaggery melts fully. Sieve into a mixing bowl.

          As soon as the jaggery is cool, tip in the bananas, pour in the coconut milk and mix with a spoon, nice and slow, until the jaggery combines fully. The mixture will now turn golden in colour.

Tip in the crushed cardamom together with the beaten rice. Mix nicely once more. Your delicious harshàlé povu is now ready to serve. Serve fresh or chilled.

Enjoy!!!

Tip:

          To extract coconut milk, grate a coconut. Transfer to a food processor. Measure out a litre of water. Add just enough of this water to grind the coconut to fine paste (it may take 2 or 3 batches). Now use a close meshed stainless steel sieve or strainer to take out the coconut milk. Use the remaining water to soak the pomace twice or thrice as you press and squeeze it with your fingers against the sieve to strain out all the juice.

Notes:

     1)    Traditionally, the peeled bananas and the beaten rice were simply squeezed together to make harshàlé povu.

     2)    For this particular recipe, I have used organic apple poovan banana, as a big bunch ripened on one of our banana palm trees. It turned out to be extra delicious. Each cultivar of small banana will impart its own unique flavour and taste to this wonder drink.