Besan laddoo

Hi everyone! This is a great recipe for gluten-free chickpea balls that work as an in-between snack or dessert. In India, they’re made for Diwali, or the festival of lights.

Besan laddoo, Hindi for chickpea flour balls, are very easy to make and do not have any gluten. If you make them at home, you can vary the amount of sugar, depending on how sweet you want them to be. You can also try a vegan version by using plant-based margarine instead of ghee or butter, but I haven’t really tried that out and couldn’t say whether they’ll taste as good as the version with dairy.

Here’s the recipe to make around 20 laddoos:

Ingredients:

300 g chickpea flour (besan in Hindi)

120 g brown sugar, ideally, powdered (I haven’t tried using honey or any other sugar supplement, so I don’t have a sugar-free version yet.)

15 pods of cardamom (If you are not a great fan of cardamom, you could use roasted and crushed almonds or cashews. Raisins are also a popular addition.)

250g ghee or butter (I use butter that has already been mixed with some plant-based oil like rapeseed oil to keep it soft. You can also use pure butter, but the consistency of the mix may become too hard to roll into balls later.)

Make it:

Empty the flour into a big, thick-bottomed pan and roast at a low temperature until the flour gets a nutty smell. You will need to keep stirring the pan so no flour gets stuck to the bottom.

Even if you can’t differentiate a nutty flavor, just remember that the chickpea needs to smell cooked and not raw. Also, the flour, which is usually bright yellow when raw, turns light brown upon roasting.

[Here’s a tip: don’t worry if the chickpea flour looks dark brown after roasting – it doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t get burnt. But do make sure it doesn’t taste raw. Cooked chickpea flour grains are harder and feel gritty when you eat them.]

Once the flour smells cooked, add the ghee or butter/margarine to the pot and mix until a dry-ish paste is formed. Now, add the sugar and mix well into a homogenous paste. Turn off the heat.

Now, peel the cardamom pods, remove the seeds and grind them by hand in a mortar. You could also use a grinder, but roughly ground seeds taste better, I think.

Mix the cardamom seeds with the chickpea flour-sugar-ghee/butter paste and let the mixture cool down. I find that the easiest and fastest way to peel cardamom pods is to grind them in a mortar with a pestle until the pods open up and then remove the peel from the seeds.

Next, wash and oil your hands and knead the mixture for a bit to bind all the ingredients. Separate a small amount – depending upon the size of the ball you want (my laddoos are usually around 2 cm wide) – and press into a ball. Do the same with the rest of the mixture. Make sure that you really press the mixture as you shape it into a ball so that it doesn’t get crumbly.

That’s it! The chickpea balls are ready-to-eat.