Silver Coated Elaichi: What Is Actually On the Cardamom

Silver-coated elaichi — chandi wali elaichi — is the green cardamom, wrapped in silver leaf, that arrives at the end of a meal or in a bowl at a wedding. It is one of the largest single uses of edible silver in India, and most people who eat it have never thought about where the silver comes from.

We make the vark. We do not make the elaichi. This is how the two meet.

What is actually on the cardamom

Nothing but silver. A sheet of vark, the same 999 fine leaf that goes onto barfi, applied to a whole green cardamom pod until the surface is covered.

The leaf is roughly 0.2 microns thick — about a five-thousandth of a millimetre. A kilogram of coated elaichi carries only a few grams of silver, which is why the coating adds far less to the price than people assume. What it adds is the look, and in the mukhwas trade the look is most of the product.

The cardamom underneath is unchanged. Silver has no taste and no smell, so a coated pod still opens with the same aroma as an uncoated one. If a coated elaichi tastes of nothing, the cardamom was poor before it was coated.

How the coating is done

By hand, mostly. The pods are tumbled or rolled with loose leaf, or sheets are pressed on and the excess broken away — the technique varies by maker and none of it is machinery you could buy off a shelf.

Coating consumes a great deal of broken leaf, which is why makers buy chura — loose silver flakes, the offcut from cutting vark to size — rather than whole sheets. Whole sheets are cut for mithai, where an unbroken surface matters. For a curved pod, flakes are both cheaper and easier to work with.

The vegetarian question, which is about the vark

Coated elaichi is often served at Jain and Hindu functions where dietary rules are strict, so this comes up.

The cardamom is not the issue. The silver is not the issue either — it is a metal. The issue is how the silver was beaten, because vark was traditionally beaten between ox gut or leather membrane, and some still is.

Machine-beaten leaf is interleaved with polyester film and touches no animal material at any stage. If you are buying coated elaichi for a function where this matters, the question to put to your supplier is not about the elaichi. It is: whose vark is on it, and what was it beaten between?

Most sellers of coated mukhwas buy their leaf in and will not know. That is worth knowing before you order for a wedding.

What we sell

We are a vark manufacturer in Ahmedabad, so what we can supply is the silver, not the finished mukhwas.

We are a vark manufacturer, so what we sell is the leaf: 999 fine silver and 24 carat gold, in sheets, on the products page. Coaters who want broken leaf rather than whole sheets should talk to us about it — it is the same metal from the same beat, and what we can supply depends on what we have cut that week.

If you are looking to buy coated elaichi rather than make it, we are not your supplier, and we would rather say so than take the enquiry.