Odia Cuisine: Popular Dishes, Stories, And Recipes

Odisha’s unique techniques of storing and preserving food come with a class of ingredients entirely their own. Lopamudra Mishra looks at mainstream Odia food, and how it has been influenced by the region’s first people, the tribals.

On a frosty January morning in Toronto’s West End, amidst suitcases in my house, my husband and I search our unpacked luggage for the carton my mother handed me in Bhubaneswar. I find it, relieved that the badis — dried lentil dumplings — are intact. I’m tempted to eat an ambula, dried mango kernel, when I notice a paper pouch holding pancha phutana that my Kumaoni mother-in-law had handpicked.

Odisha’s Culinary Treasures

There are packs of dried white peas and biri (urad dal), and a 1-kg sack of scented rice as well, adequate to make a variety of dishes that can pass the litmus test of out-and-out Odia food. A flurry of snow settles silently on the windowsill. I yearn for some hot badi tarkari, a stew with mild seasoning, dumped on a bed of steamed rice with a side of ambula raee, dried mango spiced with freshly ground mustard. Perhaps I can make some chakuli, I deliberate — a soft dosa like crepe — and stir up a pot of ghugni, white peas gravy. I gather the paraphernalia and cook everything over the next hour following some basic techniques of bata, seejha, chunka, bhaja — grinding, boiling, tempering, frying.

Dishes in the Odia food repertoire are bursting with flavour, reflecting the underground philosophy of minimalism — eating what’s available, anything additional being a bonus. Achieving maximum flavour with minimum ingredients is an art, and a closer look at Odia kitchens shows how the people of this unheeded region, especially marginal communities, have learnt to carefully craft their meals.

An Odia Thali : Pakhala, Fish, Vegetables and Badi Chura

Consider a typical Odia thali. It consists primarily of rice, either steamed and drained of the starch, bhata, or served as pakhala. First, rice is boiled with excess water. The starchy water, peja, is drained, the rice is cooled to room temperature, and more water is added to keep it submerged. The rice, submerged in water called torani, is allowed to ferment for 8-12 hours before serving as pakhala with concomitant dishes of roasted vegetables and fish, seasonal greens and badi chura, crushed lentil dumplings sautéed with onions and chilies.

With co-fermenting agents like curd, cucumber, cumin, onion or mint leaves, pakhala attains new flavours and textures. Ingenious womenfolk devised thrifty techniques to use torani in an exquisite soup, torani kanji. Water discarded from cooked rice is collected over 3-4 days, stored in earthen pots and allowed to slowly ferment, developing a pungent taste. Pots of brewing torani are a sight to watch, the aroma sensational. Everyday, half of the previous day’s water is taken out, and a fresh batch of cooled and diluted torani is added to prevent decay. Paired best with fresh autumn-winter produce, spiced with mustard, garlic, curry leaves, torani kanji is nothing short of heaven in a bowl. The famous ‘tanka torani’ sold at Ananda Bazaar at Jagannath temple in Puri, has many devotees too.

Odisha’s History of Dried Ingredients

Odisha has a longstanding tradition of dried ingredients, carefully prepared and stored, to steer one through the paucity of fresh produce or meat, a practice born from a culture of frugality and communal living. I grew up in small towns, Balesore, Keonjhar and Baripada, where every winter, women in the neighbourhood gathered to make badi, taking turns to transform their courtyard or terrace into a Lilliputian manufacturing unit.

The process is long and tedious, demanding skill and patience from the makers, involving all hands on deck. Biri is soaked overnight, washed and rubbed in the morning to get rid of the shells before grinding on a sila-bata, a heavy stone equipment consisting of two pieces: a large one on which the biri is spread and a smaller cylindrical one dragged on the biri to make the batter. In villages, women use another set of stone gear to split the whole biri before soaking. The batter is then leavened to make light and airy dumplings, laid out over clean old sarees placed on bamboo mats, and left to sun-dry for 2-3 days. Cool winter temperatures ensure the dumplings don’t get fermented or crack by excessive loss of moisture.

Sorisa (mustard), posto (poppy seeds) and other ingredients for a bata

Biri alone is not used to make badi, an ingredient sufficient to be the cynosure of a dish, or slide underneath others to add some crunch. Ash gourd, sesame seeds, popped paddy (lia or khai), peanuts and sugarcane, all find their way into the sila-bata, often with spices like cumin and carom seeds, and become batters of different consistencies and textures to make dumplings categorized by shape, size and usage. Badi making — although a women centric activity even today — is no longer just an individual home undertaking, rather a glutted small-scale industry. Cramped work schedules and smaller living spaces in cities, often lacking large sunny areas, push this endeavour off the daily hustle. Then there are migrants like me, facing -40°C temperatures and snowy porticos in peak winters. Every time I open badi packs, usually bought from markets now, I sense the touch and movements of hands and fingers that made them, the edges and folds of the facets on which they were dried.

These drying techniques are used on vegetables and fruits as well. Ambula, dried and salted mango, sometimes spiced, is ubiquitous in the local cuisine of all regions of Odisha as a readily available souring agent. Unlike ambula, karadi is a western and south-western Odisha’s forte— tips of young bamboo are collected, sliced, dipped in water and fermented for a day, to remove the bitter taste. Karadi is pounded and sun-dried to make hendua. Two years of high school in Rourkela let me indulge in delicious karadi pickles, stir fries, khattas (chutneys) and ambila (sweet tangy soups). While karadi season lasts during the monsoon, hendua satisfies cravings later in the year. The first time I tasted hendua mingled in fire-roasted tomatoes, I experienced such joy in my mouth, it left a permanent mark in my memories.

From the sprawling urban life of Toronto to a largely frozen city above the 60th parallel north, Odisha’s sun-dried delicacies have survived frigid winters and scarcities of the pandemic, and continue to produce unassuming Odia food in my kitchen, often with fresh produce that are a far cry from the homeland. If I had some umami sukhua — dried, fermented and sometimes smoked fish, prawns, shrimps — my collection would be holistic. Coastal belts abound in fish, along with inland and freshwater systems, providing livelihood to many. There’s a certain charm in dry salted ilishi. Uniformly pink and glossy, its texture remains firm after salt-drying, and a long shelf life of 1-2 years ensures year-round protein supply. I prefer a dry-salted khainga though, the ones caught from Chilika Lake, cut and fermented in saturated brine, and then dried in the shade. Heavy downpours in June and July see a profusion of small fish in rice fields and ponds, which are harvested and sun-dried without salting for 20-25 days. Stored in gunny bags and bamboo baskets, unsalted sukhua must be sold fast, owing to its short shelf life.

Indigenous and Tribal Influence on Odia Cuisine

Food of the unprivileged, sukhua is often frowned upon for its strong odor and rejected as gaucherie by the well-off, the formaldehyde drying hazard stooping its reputation further. What irony. Don’t the simplistic cooking and preservation techniques of the poor represent the soul of Odia food?

The approach of exiguity and rusticity, and I’m tempted to say ‘Marie Kondo-ing’, is not bespoke, but a way of life of the tribals, who have deeply influenced the state’s cultural ethos and culinary art. Take a hint from one of Odisha’s ancient names: Odra Desha, where Odra was a tribe of people. Bonda, Gadaba, Gond, Juang, Kondh, Koya, Kuvi, Oraon, Paraja, Santhal and Sauora are some of the major tribes in Odisha. Despite contemporary changes, often unsolicited, tribal life in most ways is deeply connected to nature. Isolated from the rest of India until Ashoka’s invasion, how tribals foraged food, what they cooked and how they stored and preserved food was uninfluenced by the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, the Mauryan Empire, Kharavela’s reign and the socio-cultural exchange with South-East Asia through trade.

In the later periods, although the tribal food system remained confined to where they lived, their food wisdom — still unacknowledged – percolated into the rest of Odisha, impacting what modern Odia people cooked, as well as the temples that served food to the gods. Some of the cornerstones of Odia cuisine including the variety of speciality pitha (cakes made of rice/lentil batter, filled with coconut and jaggery, fragrant with cardamom and camphor), pakhala (fermented rice) and the legendary dalma (assortment of vegetables and dal), are traditionally tribal dishes, and techniques like patrapoda — wrapping vegetables or meat in sal leaves and roasting on fire – and bati basa – cooking vegetables or fish in a small bowl covered with a heavy lid – both have tribal origins.

Odia cuisine robustly uses indigenous produce like ash gourd, ridge gourd, pointed gourd, pumpkins, plantain, elephant apple, colocasia, yam, arrowroot, mushrooms, field beans, broad beans, cow pea, horse gram, ragi, jackfruit, papaya to name some. Most vegetables are boiled or steamed, seejha, and then tempered, chunka. The chunka is key to the flavour of the final dish, almost like the thread that holds pearls in a string. Boiling or steaming causes less absorption of fats, explaining the sparse use of oil in Odia cooking. Saga (green leaves) are lightly tossed and commonly cooked with softer vegetables — pumpkin, eggplant, radish or lentils like yellow moong dal. Vegetables and fish are also stir-fried (bhaja), or slowly sautéed (kasa) in gravies of mustard, poppy or fennel seeds. Side preparations can also be boiled vegetables that are mashed, chakata or paga, like a coarse unfinished chutney, or poda, where veggies/fish are slowly roasted over fire, lending a smokiness to their tenor, or peels and discards ground on a sila-bata to become patua or a medley of everything together to make chencheda or ghanta.

Minimalism or Terroir In Odia Food

Minimalism is rampant in Odia cuisine, its recipes usually modest, but demanding mastery attained over time. The simple ingredients in an Odia pantry, their unusual combinations and how they’re used, emanates something that’s perhaps best described as their ‘somewhereness,’ or what the French call terroir, the distinctive contextual characteristics of something, that ultimately stamps a cultural identity and defines belongingness. Although born and brought up in Odisha for many years, my food identity is eclectic, spread across the places I have lived. Maybe this disseminated food identity helped me view Odia cuisine from a renewed lens, understand and appreciate it in places and cultures vastly different from Odisha, and identify its individuality from similar cuisines of neighbouring states, discerning its terroir.

The farther I have gone from the land of Odisha, the more I have realised how subtle and understated its food is; an insight that guides me in cooking Odia food with absolutely foreign vegetables and fish. I am at loggerheads with purists when I call such food Odia, but for now, the last of the badis await, to be savoured with whatever I can find locally.

Lopamudra Mishra is a communications professional currently based in Canada who writes a food blog, Away in the Kitchen filled with stories of her growing up and culinary experiences in different parts of India. You can follow her narratives here.

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