Thekua recipe

Before you begin

Thekua is made as prasad, not as a snack. The kitchen is scrubbed first, the cook bathes and wears fresh clothes, no onion, garlic or salt enters the room, and nothing is tasted while it is being made. Many households still cook it on a mud chulha with mango wood.

Ingredients

• 500 g whole wheat atta (coarse, stone-ground if possible)
• 200 g gur (jaggery), grated — or 150 g sugar
• 150 ml water for the gur syrup
• 60 g ghee, for moyan
• 50 g grated dry coconut (khopra)
• 1 tsp saunf (fennel seeds), lightly crushed
• 4–5 green cardamom pods, powdered
• Ghee or refined oil, for deep frying

Method

1

Make the gur syrup

Warm the water, dissolve the grated jaggery in it, then take it off the heat and strain out any grit. Let it cool to lukewarm — hot syrup makes the thekua hard.

2

Rub in the ghee

Mix the atta with the coconut, saunf and cardamom. Add the ghee and rub it through with your fingertips until the flour holds shape when pressed. This moyan is what makes thekua crisp.

3

Bind a stiff dough

Add the cooled syrup a little at a time and bring the flour together into a stiff, non-sticky dough. Do not knead it smooth like roti dough and do not rest it — thekua dough is worked as little as possible.

4

Shape and print

Take a lemon-sized portion, roll it into an oval and flatten it in your palm to about a centimetre thick. Press it on the wooden thekua saancha, or mark it with the back of a fork, so the pattern holds.

5

Fry low and slow

Heat ghee on a medium-low flame and slide the thekua in. Fry gently, turning once, for 8–10 minutes until deep golden-brown all through. High heat browns the outside and leaves the centre raw.

6

Drain and cool fully

Lift onto a steel plate or thali and let them cool completely. They crisp as they cool, and only then are they arranged in the soop with fruit and sugarcane for arghya.

Getting it right

• Coarse atta gives thekua its bite; fine maida turns it biscuity.
• If the dough cracks badly while shaping, add a spoon of warm syrup — not water.
• Fry on medium-low. Fast frying is the single most common reason thekua stays soft inside.
• Cooled completely and stored in a dry steel container, thekua keeps for a week or more.