Patoleo

Inspired by this recipe from Simply Delicious

My mother and I picked up some haldi leaves (haldi is turmeric) at the local vegetable vendor last week and we decided to make patoleo. I never liked the aroma of the leaves as a kid but couldn’t resist the stuffing. So I would hold my breath and eat it. Lucky for me, I outgrew that pettiness.

Patoleo (One patoleo is called patoli) is a sweet, celebratory preparation made in Goa and other Konkan coastal states. Depending on which religious community you belong to, you will make it on different festival or feast days. One of those days for the Roman Catholics in Goa is August 15 on the Feast of Our Lady of the Assumption. Another for the Hindus is the day before Ganesh Chaturthi, which this year falls on August 22.

With just 3 ingredients – rice (local red rice called ukadem tandul/ xitt), coconut jaggery/ sugar (maadanche god), and haldi leaves (haldi pana), it feels like the most luxurious sweet to have with tea or after a filling feast.

My mother looked up the recipe online on Simply Delicious + she had some residual food memories from her grandma making them. With a little preparation in the form of soaking the rice for 6 hours and mixing the coconut with jaggery, we began. I am not going to explain the entire process because it’s all in the video. I like this video because it show us how to make this dish even if we can’t find every single ingredient or follow the method easily. They make patoli with baking paper and added turmeric root to give it the aroma of haldi.

What I am going to do is explain how my mother prepared a steamer to make all our freams come true.

She fashioned a stovetop steamer to cook the patoleo. She put small metal vessel that sat inside a big pot. The small vessel acted as a stand for a porous lid and that lid was a the bed on which the patoleo was placed. The large pot was filled with about 2-3 cups of water, making sure it would not evaporate too fast and was also not too deep that it would touch the patoleo while the water bubbled. The large pot was covered with a lid and the patoleo was steamed for 20 minutes. I thought this was quite genius.