Puliyodharai was designed to travel. It keeps for a day without refrigeration, it improves as it sits, and it has been carried to temples and onto trains in steel dabbas for as long as anyone can remember. It is also better cold on the second day than hot on the first, which almost nothing else is.
The paste is the whole dish. Boil the tamarind extract hard, for a full ten or twelve minutes, until the raw sourness disappears and the oil floats clear on the surface. That oil layer is the doneness test, not the clock.
Then let the rice cool completely on a wide plate before you mix. Hot rice turns sticky and the grains break, and puliyodharai should be loose and separate. Make the paste once and it will sit in a jar in the fridge for a fortnight.
Everything you need for this recipe is on the shelf at One Place Bazaar, delivered to all 32 counties. See the rest of our Ganesh Chaturthi recipes.
