Chettinad Prawn Vadai / Eral Vadai

Chettinad Prawn Vadai

This my grandmother’s special recipe, this was our holiday tea time snack and brings a lot of childhood memories when I make this these days.

It’s a light and crispy vadai with lots of tiny prawns in it. It’s very difficult to find these tiny prawns these days in the market, if you live nearby seashore you can get these from the fisherman or request your fish-monger for these tiny prawns.  And these tiny prawns are also difficult to clean, at least you need 2 persons to share the cleaning job, I bought 2 kg of these tiny prawns and spent 3 hours cleaning alone. But it was worth my labor.

Ingredients

Tiny prawns ( cleaned and washed) – 500 gms

Chana dal / Kadalai paruppu (soaked in water for 1 hour) – 1 and ½ cup

Rice flour – few tbsp

Onion medium sized ( sliced) – 2 nos

Curry leaves ( chopped) – few

Turmeric powder – ¼ tsp

Cooking soda – generous pinch

Salt to taste

For Masala- coarsely grind below ingredients

Ginger – ¾ inch piece

Garlic – 5 cloves

Whole dried red chilli – 2 nos

Green chilli – 1 no

Fennel seeds / Sombu / Aniseed – 1 tsp

Prawn vadai

Method

1.      Coarsely grind the soaked chana dal. ( if few dals are whole and not ground, its well and good it will keep vadai crispy).

2.      Coarsely grind or pound the ingredients given under masala.

3.      In bowl add the thinly sliced onions, curry leaves, coarsely ground masala, turmeric powder and cooking soda. Mix well the onion and other ingredients with a spoon.

4.      Now add the coarsely ground chana dal to this onion mixture, add required salt( less salt is better)  and mix well again. If the vadai mixture is little loose, add few tbsp of rice flour and mix again.

5.      Finally add the tiny prawns to the chana dal mixture and mix very gently ( you can reserve few prawns to decorate on top of vadai).

6.      Heat oil in a pan to deep fry, when oil is smoking hot simmer the heat to medium.

7.      Shape the vadai mixture to small sized patties( like making vadai) and top each vadai with 2 or 3 reserved prawns and press gently so the prawns stick to vadai.

8.      Carefully drop the vadai to hot oil and cook until crispy and golden in colour.

9.      Drain the vadai on paper towel and serve hot.

This prawn vadai do not require any chutney

Serve as tea time snack

or with steamed rice and sambar.

Eral Vadai

Chef’s tip

1.      If you don’t have tiny prawns, you can substitute it with large prawns but chop the prawns finely.

2.      You can add handful of chopped pudina / mint leaves to vadai mixture for extra flavor.

3.      If you prefer vadai to be more meaty you can add more prawns, it’s absolutely your preference.