Chanamagaj

INGREDIENTS

  • 500g chickpea flour

  • 1 tbsp ghee

  • 2 tbsp milk

  • 225g ghee

  • 325g icing sugar

DESCRIPTION

This is a sweet that is best described as a dough made from a chickpea roux, which is frankly a terrible description but why don’t you try and do something better after reading this.

Important
 you really want relatively fresh chickpea flour (gram flour, chana flour, there are so many names for this bean) for this recipe. I have used still-good but year-old chickpea flour and had it go horribly wrong.

The dough here is pretty strange. You mix the flour with milk and ghee to form a kind of scone-esque crumbly texture, but you really want some fairly big chunks in there. These form the characteristic crunchy bits of chanamagaj. I usually just mix this until I get bored with it, it will never get down to the scone-like texture you might be expecting.

When we say "stir constantly" here we really do mean it, once you’re making the chickpea flour paste it will catch and burn in seconds, especially if you haven’t got a feel for your stove’s temperature control. This is a very time-consuming recipe, put on a podcast, I recommend that you pair the Anthropocene Reviewed episodes on Tetris and the Seed Potatoes of Leningrad and Auld Lang Syne, which, together, at 1× speed, should just about cover it.

Once you mix in the ghee and the sugar this is a pretty pleasant dough to shape, it is very greasy so it doesn’t stick to your hands, doesn’t really melt very much, and it forms a pleasant shiny surface.

This recipe doubles pretty well and halves decently well.

You can decorate this various ways, I typically do roasted chopped almonds.

PREPARATION

  1. Mix 1 tbps ghee and 2 tbsp milk and melt. Pour this over the chickpea flour, and mix and rub with your fingers until it forms a somewhat crumbly, somewhat chunky mix.

  2. Heat 450 grams of ghee in a pot until it is a clear liquid, and add all the flour mix.

  3. Cook this mix on medium to low heat, stirring all the time and scraping out the corners, for at least 45 minutes. It should change colour from a very light brown to a medium brown paste.

  4. Take the mix off the heat and let it cool to handling temperature. It will taste very bad at this point. That’s normal.

  5. Once it is cooled enough to handle, add the icing sugar to the pot and rub it through the mixture with your fingers to evenly distribute it. Unmixed pockets of dough will taste extremely bad, so try and get everything.

  6. Once it is fully mixed, shape it into blocks and decorate.

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