How To Make Appam (Fermented Rice Pancake)

Appam is a light and spongy rice pancake from India that is naturally gluten free. The traditional method uses a liquor made from coconut flowers for fermentation. Since we don’t have access to that we will be using yeast to get the rise in our batter.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

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Ingredients For Making Appam

• 1 Cup Raw Rice soaked in water overnight
• 1/2 Cup Cooked Rice
• 1 tsp Sugar
• 1 tsp Active Dry Yeast
• 3 Tbls 110° Warm Water
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1 Cup Coconut Milk
• 1 Tbls Maple Syrup

Soak Rice Overnight

We’ll start the day before we want to make the Appam by soaking a cup of rice in 2 cups of room temperature water. We just put it in a bowl with a lid, cover it and leave it on the counter overnight.

Cook Other Rice

The next morning we will make some cooked rice. We want to end up with half as much cooked rice as our soaked rice, so in this case we want 1/2 cup of cooked rice. We’ll do this early so it has time to cool.

Activate the Yeast

When we are ready to make the Appam batter we will activate the yeast. To do this we will mix 1 teaspoon of sugar and 3 tablespoons of 110° water. Then we stir in our teaspoon of active dry yeast. We’ll let this sit for 15 minutes until it gets a little foamy.

Blend The Rice

We will strain the water off our soaked rice and put the rice in a blender. Then we’ll add the cooked rice, salt and the coconut milk and blend until it is mostly smooth. This will take a while. We blend it for at least 5 minutes and it will still have a little grain from the raw rice.

Add Maple Syrup

Before we finish blending the rice we’ll add a tablespoon of maple syrup. This helps sweeten the batter as well as giving the yeast something to work on.

Pour Into A Large Bowl

Once our batter is all blended we will pour it into a large mixing bowl with a lid. We need to have plenty of room for the batter to rise. Our batter is quite thick and somewhat fluffy.

Stir In The Yeast

By this time our yeast shoud be a little foamy and activated. We’ll stir it into our batter, trying to get it well distributed.

Let It Rise

Now we’ll cover the bowl, set it in a warm place and let the batter rise. Traditional Appam would be allowed to rise and ferment overnight, as long as 24 to 30 hours. The longer it ferments the more sour the flavor. We are making a sweeter bread here and will let it rise for 3 to 4 hours before we cook the Appam. We’ve found that after about 4 hours the batter starts to deflate a little.

Cook The Appam

We’ll put a little bit of oil in a flat surfaced pan over medium heat. When the oil is hot we’ll spread the batter out to the size we want our Appam.

Cover The Pan

We’ll put the lid on the pan so the top of the Appam can cook with steam and trapped heat.

Remove To Cooling Rack

When the Appam is cooked you can touch the top surface without it sticking to your fingers. We use a pancake turner to remove the Appam to a cooling rack while we cook the next one. Once they have cooled they can be stacked on top of each other.

Fluffy Top, Golden Bottom

Our Appam is fluffy and porous on top and golden on the bottom.

Ready To Serve

We like to put butter and Kona Sea Salt on our Appam and use it to sop up any kind of curries. It’s great to have a gluten free option for that.

Serve Appam with any of our curry recipes:

• Red Curry Chicken
• Red Curry Pork Tenderloin
• Red Curry Salmon
• Yellow Curry Crab
• Thai Coconut Curry Crab

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