Churma Ladoo – Baked version with Jaggery

Recipe Description

Churma Ladoo  is a recipe for ball shaped sweet made out of crumbled Bati (unleavened bread). This authentic Churma Ladoo recipe has been further enhanced by mixing different flours, spices and nuts. Baking instead of frying and use of jaggery instead of sugar makes it even more inviting for today’s health conscious families. Snack anytime, if you are feeling low on energy or to satisfy your sweet tooth cravings just serve as a dessert.

Recipe Directions

• Add all the dry ingredients (regular whole wheat flour, coarse wheat flour, semolina (rava), chickpeas flour, almond meal/flour and salt) to a mixing bowl and mix.
• Add ½ cup of ghee to the flour mixture and mix again, it should be crumbly in texture after mixing.
• Now add milk and knead it into a stiff dough. TIP: If using stand mixer, dough would not come together for stiff consistency, use hands to bring it together, at the end.
• Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and let it rest for 30 minutes.
• Divide the dough into small equal size balls/muthiya and flatten them a bit.
• Either deep fry or bake to cook these batis/muthiyas.

  To Bake:

  • Preheat the oven @ 375 degree, place all the prepared batis/muthiyas on a baking sheet and bake for 18 minutes.
  • After 18 minutes check if the bottom of batis/muthiya are cooked and brown, then flip and bake for another 15 minutes.
  • Once all the batis/muthiyas are nicely cooked from outside, carefully crumble them using a kitchen towel and bake for another 5 minutes. To make sure that all the batis/muthiyas are cooked well from inside as well.
  • Let the cooked and crumbled batis/muthiyas cool down to room temperature.

    To deep fry:

    • Heat ghee in a deep pot (kadhai) for frying until medium hot or if you have thermometer then until it reaches to 350 degree F.
    • Deep fry few of the batis/muthiyas at a time at medium heat until they turn golden brown. Keep flipping them during the frying process for even cooking and browning. Medium heat is important to make sure that thick bati is cooked all the inside.
    • Let the fried batis/muthiyas cool down till they are easy to work with. Then break them by hand into smaller pieces.

      Now follow rest of the method whether you have baked or deep fried the batis/muthiyas:

      • Transfer room temperature crumbs or pieces to food processor and pulse them into a coarse texture mixture or churma and keep it aside.
      • Heat 1 cup ghee in a pan and roast roughly chopped nuts, chironji, and melon seeds for 5 minutes on low heat.
      • Switch off the heat then add ground churma to roasted nuts-ghee mixture and mix thoroughly.
      • Now add cardamom powder, dry ginger powder, fenugreek powder and mix thoroughly.
      • Let the mixture cool down to the temperature where you are comfortable to work with bare hands.
      • Add jaggery powder and thoroughly mix the mixture. While mixing keep rubbing them in between palms to break any lump of jaggery powder if there is any.
      • Mixer is ready to make laddu. To make laddu take a handful of portions of prepared mixture and start binding it together using fist. Once mixture start taking shape roll them between palms and keep pressing with other hand fingers to give them a perfect sphere shape.
      • Prepare all the laddus following above process.