Have you eaten Podi Mamsam? If you have, you know. And if you haven’t, read this post and let it be the next dish you cook and you too will be privy to the knowledge…that it’s the bomb. These kinds of low and slow dishes are so intense that if you eat with your fingers (like me), you have to wash your hands a couple of times with soap to get the fragrance out.
What is Podi Mamsam
Podi Mamsam is a slow-cooked, spice-heavy, bold, semi-dry mutton dish from Telangana that is little known outside the region. Mutton (goat meat) is marinated in a mixture of yoghurt, ginger paste and spices and slow cooked with a generous portion of onions, garlic, curry leaves and pounded spices. The meat is cooked till tender and enrobed in a rich, dark, almost-dry gravy. This style of cooking or bhunoing is about slow, stove-top roasting using a little water at a time to loosen the masala, intensifies the flavours and fragrance of the spices and makes Podi Mamsam the punchy dish that it is. The process is almost like baking-in the flavours with low heat.
How to make the best Podi Mamsam
- Use bone-in mutton cuts ideally from the shoulder. Bones add a lot of that meaty flavour that has us all salivating. A mutton dish with bones has a deeper, infused savouriness than a boneless one.
- Podi Mamsam has a thick sauce that coats the meat and gets fried with it, so the masala needs to be a little coarse with some texture. I always pound the spices – the cloves, cardamom, cinnamon and even the poppy seeds (khus-khus). Pounding these tiny, bouncy seeds takes some elbow grease so you could opt to dry grind them. I give the garlic cloves the same treatment. I find this adds more body to the dish. I always look for bits of fried masala when I’m enjoying Podi Mamsam.
- This dish demands patience. So pour yourself a glass of your favourite tipple and bhuno the meat to perfection. Good things are worth waiting for. It takes about 40-50 minutes for the meat to fully cook; so you’ll have to stir it every 10 minutes or so, adding water a little at a time once the gravy starts thickening. You can make the dish as wet or dry as per your preference.
The shortercut
If you’d rather not spend your time bhunoing the meat, you could cook it using a pressure cooker and then dry the gravy on the stovetop. I prefer to do it the old-fashioned way because I think it’s tastier that way. Also, sometimes, the meat can become too soft and disintegrate in the pressure cooker if you’re not careful about time. Having said that, the choice is yours. If you do try this Podi Mamsam, please let me know what you think in the comments.
Podi Mamsam
Ingredients
- 500 g mutton, curry-cut, bone-in, from the shoulder
- 100 g natural, yoghurt
- 3 large onions, sliced
- 1 tsp ginger, paste
- 4 large cloves of garlic, pounded
- ½ tbsp white poppy seeds, coarsely pounded or dry ground
- 3 1-inch pieces of cinnamon, pounded to a coarse powder
- 4 green cardamoms, peeled and pounded to a coarse powder
- 3 cloves, pounded to a coarse powder
- ½ tsp turmeric powder
- 1 tbsp red chilli powder (cayenne) (or as per taste)
- 1 tbsp dhaniya or coriander powder
- 1 tsp black peppercorns, coarsely pounded
- 2 tbsp gingelly oil
- A handful of curry leaves
- Salt
Instructions
- Whisk together the yoghurt, ground turmeric, chilly powder, salt and ginger paste in a bowl and marinate the mutton in this mixture for 3-4 hours or overnight in the fridge.
- Heat a pan on low heat, add the coriander powder and dry roast for 20 – 30 seconds. Put it aside in a bowl.
- Pour oil into the same pan and toss in the sliced onions. Fry on a gentle heat till translucent with golden edges. Then add the garlic, pounded spices, poppy seeds and half the curry leaves and sauté for a minute.
- Tip in the marinated mutton and fry for a couple of minutes. Then put a lid on the pan, lower the flame to minimum and cook till the mutton is tender. While the mutton cooks, stir intermittently, scraping the browned masala sticking to the pan and adding a little water as needed. Do this till the meat is cooked.
- Once the meat is cooked, check and correct the salt, add the remaining curry leaves and ground pepper, increase the flame to medium and fry till the gravy thickens up and the meat is a rich, dark brown. Turn off the heat and serve.