Snack, crackle and pop

And so begins my dissertation on muruku!


I spent the afternoon post-gym hours pouring out different kinds of the popular Indian snack in order to provide a pictorial reference to those wanting to wow your Hindu hosts as you eat up too much of their painstakingly fried snacks come Deepavali.

So here goes. The Godfather of murukus is this one. The  Muruku.

It is always piped to form a tight, concentric ring. Some versions have rough serrated sides, some are smooth. But they are made from the same recipe.

The original sweet muruku is the Achimuruku, also called Rose Muruku or kuih ros. It should always be light, crisp, never overly hard, and smell slightly sweetly spiced.

Achimuruku or rose muruku is the original sweet muruku.

Ammopodi is a salty muruku which is the width of a fat garden slug, in lengths of a little finger. A good Ammopodi will always have a clean, crisp crunch and the rich taste of spices when first bitten into.

Ammopodi, when done well, always provides a lovely mouthful of spices.

Star Muruku is named for the nozzle shape used to pipe the mixture into the hot frying oil. It is a savoury muruku, without the spices used in Ammopodi.

Star Muruku is great with beer as the hops give the snack dimension.

Seval is a rough-textured muruku, the width of a broad ribbon. It is generally piped to the length of a small finger, but they curl in on themselves in the oil, so not all pieces are flat.

Plain Seval 

Flavoured Seval is distinctively thinner than the original variant. It is also more orange in colour as it contains flavouring (usually of a prawn or crab variety). It is saltier than plain Seval.

Flavoured Seval. Note the raised lines which run through it. 

Pakoda is the hardest variety of muruku. It is a dense, hard nugget, heavily flavoured with spices. My personal best of show uses lots of dried red chillies which give it a hot but sweet, lingering taste. Bad ones reek of stale oil and too much MSG.

Pakoda can help elevate tension since when you are biting down on these hard snacks, you can think about decapitating your nemesis.

Karamuruku is salty, with raised flavour granules on the surface of these guppy-sized snacks. They are also more orange than typical murukus because of the addition of chilli powder.

Karamuruku. Kara means 'spicy' in Tamil. 

Special Deepavali Mix brings out the colours of the festival in your mouth.

Possibly the most popular variant at Deepavali are the Special Mixes which come in Spicy and Original (sounds like a chicken franchise!). This fine muruku is speckled with fried green peas, nuts, flour drops, and lovely deep-green curry leaves. The flavour of the Spicy variety, when done well, is an amazing melange of heat, spice, sweetness and saltiness, made even more exciting with the different textures of the flaky curry leaf, creamy groundnuts and crunchy peas. So much so that the normal muruku mixture pales a little in comparison. However, the normal muruku mixture is still, when done well, characterized by slighter thicker gauge muruku, with the bite of chilli powder, minus the special Deepavali spices and whole curry leaves.

The non-spicy Deepavali mix has all the good stuff of the Spicy mix, minus the heat. Far from boring, there is the addition of puffed rice which look like uncoloured bits of Fruity Pebbles. The absence of chilli also enables the glorious fragrance of the curry leaves to soar.

Original Special Deepavali Mix is scented with curry leaves.

Parapu is a highly spiced dhal snack, heavily coated with chilli powder, salt and spice, with curry leaves thrown in for good measure.

Parapu is close to 100 percent dhal. That's a lot of good protein. 

That wraps up my afternoon munch fest! I'll be going nuts in the next post!