As much as I love to whip up traditional farali food, I like to whip up something innovative recipes too, especially as a food blogger! So here I am with simple but scrumptious Farali Mogo Vada, which I conjured up a few years back and clicked a few pictures. Check out the recipe.
MEANING OF FARALI
Certainly not referring to the supercar! Farali translates fasting, food dishes which can be eaten during a fasting period are called Farali food. When Hindu people observe fast, certain types of food are allowed to be consumed. such as fruit, milk, root vegetables such as potato, sweet potato, taro roots, cassava, pumpkin and bottle gourd. Also, dishes made with grain-free flours such as amaranth, buckwheat and water chestnut. Instead of rice, you can have samo (barnyard millet) and Sabudana (Sago pearls).
WHAT IS FARALI VADA
Farli vada is a lip-smacking deep-fried fritter, a tweaked recipe of traditional Gujarati and Maharashtrian snack Batata Vada (Potato fritters). This Batata vada is usually prepared with spiced mashed potato balls and coated in chickpea batter and deep fried. Where in Farali vada recipe some of the ingredients are swapped or totally omitted. In Farali vada recipe, mashed potato spiced with some particular ingredients such as cumin, rock salt, and black pepper and to coat the balls instead of Chickpea flour batter, the farali flour batter is used.
FARALI MOGO VADA
In Swahili or Kiswahili Cassava root or Yuca known as Mogo. It is a starchy tuberous root and a great source of carbohydrate, and perfectly fine to use in farali recipes. In East Africa, cassava was used by most of the Indians in their regular and farali recipes as mogo is the largest growing crops over there. So, for a change, I have used boiled mogo along with the potato.
WHAT FLOURS CAN I USE FOR FARALI BATTER
For farali batter, you can use readymade mix farali flour, or individual flours such as Rajgira ka atta ( Amaranth flour ) Kuttu ka atta ( Buckwheat flour ) or Singoda/Shingada ka atta (water chestnut flour). All these flours are also gluten-free.
HOW TO MAKE FARALI MOGO VADA
As cassava is the main ingredient for this recipe, first, you will need cassava. It can be fresh or frozen, whatever you use, make sure cassava cooked thoroughly. So boil the cassava first, drain all the water and leave it to cool and mash the cassava, add a couple of boiled mashed potato too. Add minced green chilli and ginger, finely chopped coriander, few cashew and raisins, a pinch of sugar and lemon juice, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Combine everything and make a dough. Form into small balls, leave it aside and prepare a batter by combing Rajgira and Singoda flour, add a pinch of salt and water. Consistency should be a pancake batter. Dip the cassava balls into the farali batter and deep fry in the hot oil. Enjoy with farali chutney and farali boondi raita. I had leftover batter, so prepared farali boondi, check out how to make Boondi. Do you like to read our blog? Then don’t forget to sign up for email updates to get new recipes delivered right to your inbox. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest . So follow us if you can…We would love to keep in touch with you all:) If you make this recipe, please don’t forget to click a picture and hashtag it #jcookingodyssey. We really want to see 🙂
