Kakara Pitha

Kakara pitha is a pitha from the state of Odisha, made by wrapping a sweet filling in dough and frying it. The outside turns golden brown when fried, and breaking it open reveals a filling of coconut or milk. It is made for festivals and also serves as an offering to the gods.

Round fried kakara pitha and a cross-section. Taken in 2021, Subhransuphotography / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Reduced-size version from the source; no changes to the content after retrieval.

A grain shell and a sweet filling

In one method, semolina is added to boiling water and stirred, then cooled slightly and kneaded. For the filling, grated coconut and jaggery are cooked over heat to reduce their moisture, then combined with spices such as cardamom and black pepper. The dough is flattened, wrapped around the filling, and the seam is shaped closed before frying, which gives the outside a toasty flavor. Reducing the moisture of the filling before wrapping makes it easier to keep inside the dough.

Some versions add chhena to the filling, and in a recipe introduced by a millet promotion program in Odisha, coconut is wrapped in a dough of semolina combined with ragi flour. Some versions use wheat flour, so it is not a sweet defined by any single flour or filling. For chaula kakara, which uses rice flour, the flour is cooked with hot water and kneaded while still warm, then wrapped around a filling of coconut and jaggery and fried.

Festivals and family kitchens

In Odisha, various pithas are made for festivals tied to milestones in the farming year. Kakara is one of the fried sweets served at those meals. Cook Sweta Biswal remembers mornings when her mother and grandmother kneaded rice flour for offerings on the winter Thursdays when the goddess Lakshmi is welcomed. On school holidays, she helped make pitha beside them. Another writer, Soumya Gayatri, remembers her mother frying kakara filled with chhena in several batches for festivals and setting them aside to cool. In the afternoons she would sneak off to eat some, and she also enjoyed the warm ones fresh out of the pan.

Kakara is also named as one of the foods offered in the evening in an introduction to the rituals of the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Home-made versions and temple offerings each have their own way of being made. In Bhubaneswar, some shops serve it as a breakfast item, so it is eaten outside festivals as well. One person who ate it at an Odia restaurant in Delhi wrote that the version made with semolina was faintly sweet inside, crisp outside, and fragrant with white sesame.

Glossary