KERALA CHUTNEY POWDER

It is a Kerala dry chutney powder of roasted coconut, chilli, shallot and curry leaf. Most commonly it is mixed into hot rice with a spoon of coconut oil, or eaten alongside kanji. It also goes with idli, dosa and puttu.

Because roasted coconut carries its own oil, and that oil eventually turns. Four to six weeks is realistic. Spice powders without coconut keep for months; this one does not, and any brand claiming a year has either added preservative or used very little coconut.

Trust your nose. Fresh chammanthi podi smells sweetly nutty. Once the coconut oil oxidises it smells sharp, waxy or faintly soapy. At that point discard it.

Moderately hot. It is built around roasted coconut rather than chilli, so the heat sits behind the nuttiness rather than leading. We can grind it hotter or milder to order.

You can loosen it with a little warm water or curd into a thick chutney, though it is traditionally eaten dry with oil. Wet chammanthi is a separate fresh-ground preparation.

Yes. It is made from spices, dal and salt only, with no animal-derived ingredient and no anti-caking agent.

No. No MSG, no artificial flavour, no colour and no preservative. The flavour comes from roasting the whole spices properly, which is also why it has a shorter shelf life than a supermarket packet.

It is blended and ground in small batches from whole spices rather than produced in a long factory run and warehoused. There is no filler, no colour and no preservative in it, so it smells of the spices themselves - and it has a shorter useful life than a packet, which is the honest trade-off.

Yes, in small batches. Ground spice loses its aroma within a few months, so holding large quantities of a finished blend would defeat the point.