Murukkus show that extruded foods can be healthy and delicious

When Ammini Ramachandran’s mother wanted murukkus, she called Janu Ammiyaar, a neighbour known for her expertise in making these crunchy spiral snacks. In her book Grains, Greens, and Grated Coconuts, Ramachandran describes Ammiyaar mixing rice and urad dal flours with cumin, sesame, salt, and water in which a lump of asafoetida had been soaked and then kneading this dough till it was just the right silky texture.

She would then pinch a piece into a pyramid to represent Lord Ganesha and say a prayer. After that, she would take a lemon-sized lump and start twisting it into a curly strand that was coiled into a spiral: “Watching her effortlessly turn out thin, multilayered circles of curly spirals, with just her index finger and thumb, was fascinating and dissuading at the same time.” Ramachandran recommended the easier option of using a hand-turned press to extrude the dough in strands that were coiled and kept ready for deep-frying.

Thousands of murukku presses must be in action now, preparing for Ganesh Chaturthi next month.


Murukku is an essential part of bakshanam, the snacks served to welcome guests, and no one is more welcome than Lord Ganesha. There are wide varieties, ranging from the original hand-formed kai murukku to the variations in form made possible by different discs in

The press, like mul murukku, which is covered with little prickles (mul in Tamil) for extra crunch, or the smooth coils of thenkuzhal.

While the rice-urad flour combination is classic, many variations are possible with different grains and pulses. Butter or ghee in the dough adds a luxurious touch. Ribbon pakoda ditches the coils for short pasta-like lengths. Tamilians have taken the snack around the world, like to South Africa, where murkoos are made with maize and given flavors like Italian herb or spring onion. Green murukkus made with spinach paste are popular in Tamil Nadu now, but I find the dark red versions made with beetroot too startling.

I have even had a non-veg murukku made with dried fish powder, prepared by a marine scientist at a fisheries fair.

Murukkus are so varied that it can be deeply annoying to hear North Indians lump them all as chaklis. They should also be given credit as precursors to the giant industry that has developed around extruded foods. Hand-turned pasta makers have been around since the 17th century, with one of the earliest references intriguingly coming from Thomas Jefferson, the USA’s third president. In Judson M Harper’s highly technical manual Extrusion of Foods, he writes that “General Mills Inc was the first to use an extruder in the manufacture of ready-to-eat (RTE) cereals in the late 1930s”. The pet food industry was the first to take up extrusion in a big way, creating pellets of animal protein that were dried for easy storage and use.

In Pandora’s Lunchbox, Melanie Warner’s exposé of the impact of highly processed foods on the American diet, she notes how “extrusion machines could take multiple ingredients, mix them rapidly and form cereal into a potentially endless array of fun-filled shapes."

Extruded breakfast foods and snacks were big sellers but came with a hidden cost. The high-speed machines couldn’t handle fibres, so only the starchiest, least-nutritious parts of grains were used. The extrusion process created heat, which was seen as useful in killing bacteria, but it also damaged nutrients such as vitamins, which then had to be chemically added back.

Warner damns extruded foods create the highly addictive-yet-nutritionally-compromised foods that have inflicted huge harm on childhood diets in particular, leading to an explosion of obesity and poor health. “Extrusion is undoubtedly the harshest and most nutritionally devastating way to process cereal.” It is a pity that the US never took its cue from murukkus, whose pulse flours make them more nutritious, and whose many variations, with millets and other grains, could have offered a better model for excellent extruded foods.