Neipathal/Neipathiri (Rice Puri? :)

Neipathal is one of the traditional treats seen in Malabar Muslim households. It is deep fried pathiris made of rice, coconut, fennel and shallots. You may call it as rice puri as it looks like a puri-a coarse ground or crispy rice puri.

This is usually served with beef fry (varattiyathu) or any other meat delicacies. The ingredients used here is same as that of aanapathal (kozhipidi); but the method of cooking is entirely different. Back home, people uses the giant grinders or tabletop grinders to grind this dough and they may or may not use any rice flour for this recipe. But this is not possible these days as most of us dont have such equipments with us these days, neither we ve so much of time to spend in kitchen. I shall try to explain the method of preparing the dough using tabletop grinders and juice machines.

Ingredients:

Parboiled rice/U.S style rice 3 cups

Coconut,grated 2 cups

Rice Flour (arippodi) 1 cup or more

Fennel seeds (saunf or perumjeerakam) 2 tsp

Onion 1 big

Water 2 cups

Oil to deepfry

Method:

Soak parboiled rice in warm water for 3-4 hours or overnight.

Drain rice through a strainer. (You can avoid this step; I'm doing this just to give you the exact measurement of water to be used .)

Now mix all other ingredients except rice flour and oil.

Its time to grind rice.

Table top grinders

If you have a table top grinder, then no need to add rice flour. Increase the quantity of parboiled rice to 4 cups and then coarsely grind the rice mix using minimal water. The dough should resemble that of roti dough or slightly tightier than that.

Juice machine grinders

You can coarsely grind the rice mix without using water in this and finally add some water . Then mix with rice powder to make the dough.

Juice Machines

Here we use the big jar, the usual one we use to grind dosa maavu or to blend any juices. I've Panasonic steel jar (bought from India) the one similar to Sumeet or any other indian brand. Its too good for grinding rice . In this we can grind rice by adding too little water. We need coarsely ground rice here. For that just pulse for 30 seconds each time; ie; once we put in the rice,coconut,onion and water in the jar , pulse it for 30 seconds and then you are done.

Mix this coarsely ground paste with rice powder using salt to make the dough similar to rotis/chappathis or slightly tightier than that .

Take a kadai/chinese wok or any other deep bottomed vessel and heat oil in it enough for deepfrying.

Now take a piece of cloth or plastic sheet on which the pathiri is rolled. Make balls out of the dough and then flatten on the piece of cloth or plastic using your fingers . The pathiri should be 2 or three inches in diameters and 1/2 inch thick.

When the oil is too hot, you can sink in the pathiris just like we do for puris. This will puff up and once it is done in one side, turn it upside down and fry the other side too till it turns crispy brown.

Serve hot with beef fry, kadai chicken or any other non veg thick gravies.