My Food Story: An Italian twist to a desi recipe

Pumpkin flowers are high in nutritional value. It is harvested throughout the year in Odisha. Whenever we visit our native village, we find this flower in every nook and corner of every house’s garden.

I love natural healthy recipes. So, I curated this recipe in 2022 during a visit to my native village. I just added the cheese stuffing to make it more flavourful and give an Italian twist to a desi recipe.

Kakharu phoola pakoda (Cheesy Pumpkin flower fritters)

Ingredients

Pumpkin flowers – 2 pieces

Grated cheese cubes (Britannia) – 5 tsp

Grated apple – 3 tsp

Chopped onions – 3 tsp

Pepper powder – 1 tsp

Gram flour – 5 tsp

Rice bran oil – 2 tsp

Nigella seeds – 1 tsp

Salt – 1/2 tsp

Method

To make cheesy pumpkin flower fritters, first wash the pumpkin flowers well and pat them dry. Trim off the lower part of the flower, including the stalk and stigma, keeping only the petals. For the stuffing, mix chopped onions, grated cheese, grated apple, pepper powder, and salt. Prepare a gram flour batter with nigella seeds and a little oil and set it aside.

Heat some oil on a tawa (griddle). Take one flower, fill it with the stuffing, dip it in the batter, and shake off the excess. Place it on the tawa and shallow fry. Cook each side for about two minutes, adding a little oil, until crisp and golden brown. Serve the cheesy pumpkin flower fritters hot with ketchup or chutney of your choice.

My Food Story is a collection of stories and recipes that celebrate India’s traditional plant-based ingredients sourced from local biodiversity. You can see these recipes on our interactive dashboard (https://www.cseindia.org/page/myfoodstory).

Join us as we showcase the recipes shared with us by the participants of a recently concluded recipe contest.

Sucheta Bose is an entrepreneur, home chef and faculty from Odisha