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.
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Important
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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.
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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.