Bommai Poosani and the Gourd Shelf: A Buying Guide

"Gourd" is a loose umbrella term in English for a family of vegetables that Tamil cooking treats as several genuinely different ingredients. Bommai poosani — the name translates literally as "toy pumpkin", for its small, round, ball-like shape — sits in the same general family as ash gourd and yellow pumpkin, but it's worth knowing on its own terms rather than lumping it in with every round vegetable on the shelf.

Bommai poosani: the round pumpkin for kootu

Like other pumpkin varieties, bommai poosani has a firm, dense flesh once you get past the skin, and it's most often cooked into a kootu — chopped into cubes, boiled until soft, and combined with cooked lentils and a ground coconut-cumin paste, finished with a mustard-curry leaf tempering. The dense flesh holds its shape through boiling better than a softer vegetable would, which is part of why it works well in a kootu that's meant to have distinct vegetable pieces rather than turning to mush.

Chow chow: the mild, quick-cooking one

Chow chow — also called chayote in English — has pale green, ridged skin and a very mild flavour that takes on whatever it's cooked with. It's a genuinely fast-cooking vegetable: peeled, cubed and simmered, it softens in a matter of minutes, which makes it a common choice for a quick kootu or thoran on a weeknight when there isn't time for a slower-cooking vegetable. Because the flavour is so mild, chow chow also works well diced small into sambar as a bulking vegetable alongside something more assertive.

Kovakkai: the small, firm one for a dry poriyal

Kovakkai — ivy gourd or tindora in English — looks nothing like the round pumpkins: small, oblong, bright green pods, usually sold whole rather than pre-cut. The standard treatment is a dry poriyal: the pods are sliced thin lengthwise (or into rounds) and pan-fried with a mustard tempering until the edges start to crisp slightly, rather than boiled or added to a gravy. That slicing step is worth doing by hand rather than rushing — thin, even slices are what let kovakkai crisp properly instead of steaming in its own moisture.

How to tell them apart at a glance

• Bommai poosani: round, ball-shaped, firm dense flesh, usually cut into wedges or cubes before sale.
• Chow chow: pear-shaped, pale green, ridged surface, smooth and soft once peeled and cooked.
• Kovakkai: small, oblong, bright green pods sold whole, firm bite even after cooking.

Storage notes

Bommai poosani, being a firmer, denser vegetable, keeps the longest of the three — several days in a cool, dry spot, or longer in the fridge if it's already been cut. Chow chow and kovakkai are best used within a few days, stored in the vegetable drawer.

Buying a whole pumpkin vs. a cut piece

Bommai poosani is often sold cut into wedges rather than whole, simply because a whole pumpkin is more than most households need for one dish. A cut piece is fine to buy, but check the exposed flesh for firmness and a fresh colour — a piece that's been sitting cut for a while starts to look slightly dull and can develop a soft, weeping edge where it was sliced. Chow chow and kovakkai, being smaller to begin with, are almost always sold whole, which makes freshness easier to judge at a glance: firm skin, no wrinkling, and no soft spots anywhere on the surface.

All three are stocked in the vegetables category — a useful browse if a kootu recipe calls for "any gourd" and you're deciding which one to actually put in the cart, with Express delivery in about 60 minutes.