Kama (Roasted Grain Flour Whipped with Kefir)

Variations

• Talkan / talkkuna: the same thing under other names across a wide band — talkkuna in Finland, talkan or tolqon in the Turkic languages, tolohkna in the Võro-speaking south of Estonia. The Finnish version steams the grain first, mills it, and roasts it last, which gives a duller aroma and a coarser texture.
• The grain ratio: barley usually carries half or more of it. Oats are sometimes replaced with wheat flour, and black beans are sometimes added. Do not drop the peas — a good share of the savoury depth is theirs.
• As breakfast: the everyday form is not a dessert at all, just kama stirred into milk or kefir with sugar and berries. The photograph is kamavaht, the whipped version with cream folded through.
• Beside dasik: both confections start from roasted flour. Dasik is blunt that raw flour will not do, and then binds it with honey's viscosity and the pressure of a carved mould, with no liquid anywhere. Kama takes the same premise in the opposite direction: the liquid is the binder.
• Against mohinga: mohinga dry-toasts chickpea flour too. But it toasts for aroma and then whisks the result into broth and boils it. With kama, the roasting is the cooking.

Tips

• Why it does not need cooking. Choosing flour explains flour through protein. Kama has no intention of building gluten; the interesting part is its starch. Roasting whole grain breaks starch down into dextrins and sets some of it gelatinised, so stirred into cold kefir it tastes cooked. Wheat flour treated the same way tastes exactly as raw as it is.
• Compare it with a roux and the direction reverses. Thickening a sauce cooks flour in butter to lose the raw taste and pays for it in thickening power — which is why a brown roux thickens less than a white one. Kama pays the same price while roasting. The difference is that kama was never trying to thicken anything, so the loss costs it nothing.
• Sieve the flour in, and put the flour into the liquid. Liquid poured onto flour wets the outside and seals a dry core inside the lump. Douhua pours soy milk onto the coagulant rather than the reverse, which looks like the same instruction backwards — but that is about how fast two things meet, and this is about the order in which one of them gets wet.
• The roast is the whole flavour. One shade darker is nutty; two is bitter. Scorched grain cannot be recovered, and kefir's sourness does not cover it.
• Why kefir rather than milk. Milk works and tastes flat. Kama brings savoury depth and neither sweetness nor acid, and balancing flavour is the reason the sour dairy matters: without acid the bowl has nothing to push against. The jam is there for the same reason more than for the sugar.
• It needs the full 20 minutes to thicken. Add more flour because it looks thin when freshly mixed and twenty minutes later the spoon will stand up in it.