Thattu for October & November

I've fallen behind on my Thattu supper club posts. It wasn't much helped by the November delivery being mid-month to avoid colliding with people's Thanksgiving travel. I imagine December will be the same, but I haven't heard yet.

October

They've started to establish some norms: some sort of hand pie to start, curry as a main, and two sides. This was a solid menu: wasn't too hard to reheat, and everything was delicious.

But I would have really preferred the chicken to be 🅱️oneless. It was cooked really well and essentially fell off the bone, but it's kind of annoying and messy to do that myself. I know it's meant to be in the vein of home cooked meals, so that's staying true to what they wanna do -- but it's still annoying, especially after the fish last time:

But. The fish in the curry was a couple steaks cut from the whole fish -- bones and all. Having to deal with all the little (and sometimes large) bones was annoying. If they do fish again, I hope it'll be 🅱️oneless.

The beet salad was cool; this was mid-October, in the middle of the jewish high holidays, and this took inspiration from Kerala's own jewish cuisine.

I still have not made a trip to their resturant yet, so I was surprised by their prepackaged biscuit -- I had no idea they had a retail operation. The website doesn't offer anything like that, but I do see a couple other things (like Dave's hot sauce) on their socials.

November

This menu broke the tradition: no hand pie. And most excitingly: everything was 🅱️oneless!

When I got the bag, my first thought was it was a little small compared to the previous months. I was worried they were phoning it in.

But: no, not at all. There wasn't any rice this time, and although the sides were small, they packed a ton of flavour. The eggplant is my favorite Thattu dish to date. I'm not sure what eggplants they use, but they were small and firm. They held onto the sauce beautifully -- and the sauce itself was really damn good. Something with tamarind and coconut. These were served with some pearl onions & tomatoes.

Kokum cake was exciting: we'd seen kokum previously at Indienne in a cocktail, so getting another sample of it was great. This was turned into a really hefty frosting, so it was super-sweet, but the kokum's tang still punched through all of that sugar to shine.

The duck was duck -- it doesn't need much to be excellent. It once again looked like a small portion, but with the semolina casserole and bread, it was more than enough.

The bread itself didn't seem to travel well. I reheated them in a hot pan, but it never really got as flaky as you'd expect. The instructions didn't mention it, but everyone making porotta on YouTube has a final step where the slap the shit out of it to break the layers apart and fluff it up.

I'm not sure it would have fluffed up like that: it was pretty dense. It might have been better to send them frozen and let me cook them, but that adds some logistical challenges to delivery that they'd have to prepare people for.