We are serious rasam lovers in our home. Tomato Paruppu Rasam is, of course, an all-time favorite, but we—especially Girish, who is truly THE rasam aficionado—love experimenting with different garnishes, mix-ins, and even the main ingredients themselves.
Garlic rasam, ginger rasam, lemon rasam, pineapple rasam—these are all fairly common variations. One of the beautiful things about rasam is how easily it adapts to seasonal produce, as long as the ingredient has some tang and can either complement tamarind or replace that sour note altogether. Think raw blueberries, gooseberry (amla), raw mango. At its core, rasam is a light, soupy broth made by boiling a sour (sometimes lightly sweet) ingredient with spices and finishing it with fragrant herbs.
So when I started seeing a flurry of “how to peel a pomegranate easily” videos on Instagram, I promptly picked up the biggest pomegranates I could find at Trader Joe’s (my favorite store). For a few days, it was practically raining pomegranates in our kitchen. They weren’t overly sweet and were quite tangy—probably still early in the season here.
That’s when the rasam critic had a brilliant idea: add pomegranate to rasam for dinner. And just like that, we discovered a new favorite. Slightly sweet, pleasantly tangy, and packed with pomegranate goodness, this rasam has officially earned a spot in our regular rotation.
This recipe is also very flexible and easy to experiment with. You could add it to a pepper–cumin slurry to make a pomegranate milagu (pepper) rasam, or take it in a different direction and make it closer to a paruppu rasam, which is how I tried it today.
- 1 cup pomegranate arils
- ¼ cup boiled toor dal
- 2 tsp tamrind paste; or tamarind pulp from 1 small lemon sized tamarind
- A pinch jaggery (optional)
- A pinch tumeric powder
- 2 tbsp rasam powder
- 2 green chilies slit
- 2 tbsp cilantro chopped
- salt to taste
- For tadka or garnish:
- 1 tbsp ghee
- ½ tsp mustard seeds
- ½ tsp cumin seeds
- ½ tsp pepper
- 4-5 curry leaves
- Mix about 1 cup water to the boiled toor dal and mix well.
- Take this mixture in a heavy bottomed vessel (I use a vessel made of an alloy of metals called iyya chombu).
- Add the tamarind paste, green chilies, rasam powder and a pinch of jaggery.
- Let this boil until the raw smell of rasam powder goes away.
- In the meantime, puree the pomegranate seeds with ½ cup of water in a blender. Strain the mixture to get pomegranate juice.
- Add the pomegranate juice to the boiled turn dal mixture in the vessel.
- Let it boil for another minute and take this off the heat.
- Make the tadka by heating ghee and adding the tadka ingredients to the hot ghee. Wait for the mustard seeds to splutter and then add this to the rasam mixture.
- Garnish with chopped cilantro.
- Serve with hot rice or millet with a dollop of ghee.
