One of Bollywood’s biggest fitness icons, Malaika Arora has always vouched for maintaining a healthy balanced diet over fad diets or starving. The 48-year-old has also never shied away from admitting that she is, in fact, a big foodie. The same can be concluded from her Instagram posts and stories, the actress sure loves her salads as much as she loves her pizza. She also happens to have quite a thing for laddoos. Besan laddoo, to be specific, is Malaika's 'biggest weakness’ according to a recent Instagram story posted by the 'India’s Best Dancer' judge. On Sunday, she shared an image of four besan laddoos with a caption that read, “My biggest weakness.....besan laddoos (sic).”
For the uninitiated, besan laddoo is an Indian sweet made with besan or gram flour, sugar, cardamom and some chunky nuts. The sweet is round in shape. Oodles of ghee or clarified butter is used for flavour and give the laddoos their characteristic softness.
Besan ka laddoo is actually pretty easy to make, but seldom can we mimic the halwai-style magic in our homemade laddoos. But fret not, we have got some effective tips and hacks that can help you make delish besan laddoos at home.
1. Choose the right flour. To make laddoos, it is best to take flour of split chana dal.
2. Roast. Roast. Roast. There is no shortcut here. The more you roast, the more flavourful and more aromatic your laddoos turn out to be. But make sure you do the roasting on medium flame, else you will burn your flour. You may see some lumps in the stage of dry roasting the flour, but they will smoothen out.
3. The roasting needs to continue even after you add ghee, it ensures your laddoo dough has the right consistency.
4. It is best to add ghee after your besan is roasted and you can smell the fragrance. At this stage, the colour of besan also changes to a golden brown. If you add ghee right away, there is a greater risk of lumps.
5. Use desi ghee to make the best quality, halwai-style besan laddoos.
6. After you add the ghee, keep stirring until ghee and besan are well mixed and you have a luscious, golden paste-like mixture. This should take up to 15 minutes, depending upon your flame, kadhai and how you are stirring
7. Mix till the paste becomes one whole unit and starts leaving the pan from the edges.
8. Now mix in the sugar powder or boora and make sure there are no lumps
You will find boora in any Indian grocery store. Alternatively, you can also run your regular sugar in a mixer grinder and use that.
9. Once the sugar is well-mixed, add dry fruits and spices of your choice like almonds, cardamom, walnuts etc.
10. Let the mixture cool down. Grease both your palms with ghee and shape the laddoos into size of small balls.
Here is an easy-peasy recipe of besan ladoo that you may also like.
