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!

Muruku 101

Deepavali is coming! I love the Festival Of Lights. I love its take on the ritual washing away of sins, and the victory of light over darkness. I love the iridescent colours of the sarees my neighbours wear and the aptly-lurid colours of the kolaam. But most of all, I love Deepavali food. Specifically muruku.

I've eaten these Indian snacks for as long as I remember. Kamala, my Indian 'ayah' (nursemaid) would bring rustle-y packets of these crunchy tidbits for us after she returned from her Deepavali leave. My parents' cleaner, Jaya, would always save a big box for us when she made her homemade treats. And my folks' wonderful neighbours, the Sivashanmugams in Bangsar always made sure they would bring back boxfuls of these crunchy morsels when they returned from visiting family in India.

It was not until recently, however, that I had the opportunity to learn more about muruku from a neighbour who is starting up her own little muruku supply home business. Always the good neighbour, (not to mention a massive greediguts), I began by sampling their wares.

The folk from two doors down have sacks of legumes and nuts. Also crisps and crackers. But the highlight is the muruku. The creation story of muruku goes as such:

In the beginning there was the trinity of Muruku, Achimuruku and Ommopodi. Muruku is the godhead of this triumvirate. It is the gram flour snack characterised by serrated edges which are looped in on itself to form a concentric circle which is dotted by cumin seeds. The only sweet variety in this trio is Achimuruku which is also known as 'kuih ros', or 'rose' due to the shape of the mould which is used to make this crispy, light, brittle snack. It is also the only one of the three which uses egg in its manufacture. Ommopodi are the inch-long millipede-sized crisps which boast a distinctive curry leaf aroma and flavour, when done well.


From this gene pool has come a variety of intermarriages and caste-jumpers, ranging from Star Muruku (named for the star shaped nozzle which the mixture is piped from), Seval (a more dense gram flour snack) and Pakoda (the jaw-breakingly hard but spice-fragrant droplets).

My neighbours get their stock from a family member on the wife's side who owns and operates her own muruku factory in Ipoh, Perak. The factory owner prides herself on her products and insists I tell you that the reason her stuff tastes so good is because she never reuses the oil each batch of muruku is fried in. Yeah, that's the bad thing - muruku is all fried, all of the time. No one's ever come out with a 'baked, not fried' version.

I've gone through all my neighbours' wares and have, right now, little bags of neatly tagged muruku and its variants on my desk. They're knotted shut, but the lovely, intoxicating aroma of chilli powder, curry powder and spices still infuse the air six inches above my table. Tonight, I am the Mistress of Spices. Tomorrow, I will be helping Kit photograph the different varieties in order to make sense of this jumbled pool of snacks, so necessary to the completion of every Deepavali open house. The day after, I might be Mistress of Gas since muruku uses a lot of gram and dhal. A LOT.

I'll keep you posted. And will take orders on behalf of my neighbours. With no charge, except that of spreading the good news that Ipoh's most famous muruku is available in the Klang Valley!