38 Sabudana Recipes for Fasting, Frying and Feasting

The whole game is water ratio, and the honest answer is that it depends on your pearls. Start here: rinse in a bowl under running water, swirling with your hand, until the water runs clear instead of milky. That milky stuff is loose surface starch, and it is exactly what glues everything into a paste later. Three or four rinses usually does it. Then drain properly — tip the bowl and let it sit tilted for a minute.

Now add water to sit just level with the top of the pearls — not a finger above, level. Cover, leave it five to six hours or overnight, and do not stir. In the morning the bowl should look dry, the pearls plump and matte. Test one: press it flat between your nails. If it smears cleanly with no white speck in the middle, you are ready. If there is a hard centre, sprinkle two tablespoons of water, wait forty minutes, test again. If the bowl is wet and the pearls are slumping, you have overdone it — drain them, spread them on a tea towel, and let them air-dry for an hour. Fluff with a fork before cooking. That fork matters more than it sounds; it separates the pearls that have clung together overnight and saves you from the single grey lump I made when I was nineteen.

Vrat cooking is not one rulebook. It shifts by region, by family, and by which fast you are keeping — Navratri, Ekadashi, Mahashivratri and Shravan somvar all have their own habits. But the common thread across most North and West Indian households is this: no grains, no lentils, no onion, no garlic, and no ordinary table salt. Tapioca pearls qualify because they come from cassava root, not a cereal grain, which is why they anchor so much fast-day cooking.

Swap regular salt for sendha namak, rock salt, which has a rounder, less aggressive bite — start with three-quarters of what a normal dish asks for. Ghee replaces refined oil in most homes. For flour, reach for rajgira (amaranth), singhara (water chestnut), or kuttu (buckwheat). Permitted vegetables usually mean potato, sweet potato, bottle gourd, pumpkin, cucumber and tomato; permitted spices are cumin, black pepper, green chilli and ginger, while turmeric, mustard seed, asafoetida and coriander powder are commonly left out. Peanuts and their oil are fine almost everywhere. Curd, milk and paneer are fine too.

When in doubt, ask the person whose fast it is — the rules that matter are the ones your household keeps. I have watched two aunts argue about whether tomato counts for a full twenty minutes, and neither of them was wrong. Write down what your family does and you will never have to relitigate it.

Not all pearls are the same, and the packet rarely tells you which you have bought. Nylon sago — confusingly, nothing to do with nylon — is the small, hard, glassy sort, roughly 2 to 3 mm, and it is what you want for khichdi and vada. It holds its shape, stays separate, and drinks water predictably. Medium pearls at 4 to 5 mm suit kheer, where a little collapse is welcome. The big 8 mm boba-style pearls belong in drinks and jelly; they need boiling, not soaking, and will never behave in a savoury dish.

In the shop, tip the packet toward the light. Good pearls are uniformly sized, bright white with a faint sheen, and rattle like tiny beads. Reject anything with visible powder in the bag, yellowing, or pearls of obviously mixed diameters — mixed sizes hydrate at different rates, which is the single most common reason a batch turns out half-crunchy and half-mush. Give the bag a squeeze; it should sound dry and clean, not muffled.

At home, store them in a glass jar with a tight lid, somewhere dark. They keep for a year easily, but they do absorb smells, so keep them away from the masala shelf. If you find weevils, throw the lot out — do not try to sift and salvage. Two bay leaves in the jar seem to help, though I have no evidence beyond my grandmother's insistence.