This recipe is directly lifted from chefinyou’s murukku recipe which is the first place we ever learned to use urad dal flour to make murkoo.

Urad dal, or black lentil, flour, is extremely hard to find in many places, and seems to be crucial to getting the texture of this just right. You can probably get it online, and frustratingly this recipe uses like one tablespoon of it. In theory you can make it from black lentils but I do not want to mill flour in my blender.

Typically a heavy hand-cranked brass press with a star-shaped extrusion plate is used to pipe out the murkoo, either into spirals on a tray or directly into the hot oil. I have seen people form this by hand, but I’ve never done that. Most conventional biscuit presses don’t have a sufficiently sharp, or sufficiently small, star-shaped press for murkoo.

You want the dough here just barely pliable enough to force through the press without breaking, so err on the side of less water in the dough. You can set aside a little dough if you want a backup if you overshoot, but you have a decent amount of leeway so just go slow. Very firm doughs can be easily pressed right into the oil, but might not form nice fancy spirals. Softer doughs can be formed into spirals and then moved to the oil more easily. Both are good.