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Cookware · Hearths

Idli steamer

Stacked plates with dimples: fermented rice-and-lentil batter steamed into breakfast.

Also called idli pot, idli cooker · From South India

A stacked idli steamer with white steamed cakes, coconut chutney, and sambar.

The journey

Idli is a steam cake. Tamil and Kannada kitchens still pour a fermented batter of rice and urad into greased molds, stack them in a steamer, and eat the result with chutney and sambar. The pot is how a soft batter becomes a bread you can pick up.

A bamboo steamer can hold ramekins. The idli stand is the dimples that already know the size.

A botanical plate of rice — the grain South India still steams into idli.
Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen (1887) · Public domain. Source

In the kitchen

Grease the molds. Fill three-quarters. Steam until a toothpick comes clean. Do not open early.

The Indian volume's South Indian breakfasts assume this stack. A rice cooker with an insert can stand in.

Used in these ComidaTime kitchens