Adadiya Pak

Kathiawari winter fudge of coarse black gram flour roasted in ghee with fried edible gum, jaggery, dry ginger, and pistachios, set in a tray and cut into squares

Origin: Kathiawar & Gujarat, India

From the journey of Black Gram.

Adadiya pak, or simply adadiya, is the winter sweet of Kathiawar and Kutch, in western Gujarat. Adad is the Gujarati name for black gram, and pak is the family of dense, ghee-rich sweets cooked in syrup or jaggery and set in a tray. It is made in large batches as the cold season starts and eaten a piece at a time in the morning through the winter months. It belongs to a tradition, shared across much of India, of foods thought of as warming and strengthening in the cold. The spices say so plainly: dry ginger, ganthoda (the root of long pepper), nutmeg, and cardamom, together with edible gum, gund, fried until it puffs and crumbles. Whatever one makes of the medical reasoning, it produces a sweet of real depth, nutty from the long roasting of the flour and faintly hot from the spices. The technique that makes it is called dhrabo. Before roasting, the coarse flour is rubbed with a little hot ghee and milk and left to rest, then pushed through a sieve. That gives it a sandy, open grain, so that it roasts evenly in the ghee rather than clumping into a paste, and it is what gives good adadiya its crumbly, almost granular bite.

Ingredients

Flour

  • 250 g coarsely ground urad dal flour
  • 2 tbsp ghee, melted and hot
  • 2 tbsp whole milk, warm

Roasting

  • 200 g ghee
  • 30 g edible gum (gund)

Sweetening

  • 200 g jaggery, grated, or caster sugar
  • 60 ml water

Spices

  • 1.5 tsp dry ginger powder (sonth)
  • 1 tsp ganthoda powder (long pepper root)
  • 0.5 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 tsp ground cardamom

To Finish

  • 30 g almonds, chopped
  • 20 g pistachios, slivered

Method

  1. Rub the hot ghee and warm milk into the urad flour with your fingertips until evenly moistened, cover, and leave for 30 minutes. Push the flour through a coarse sieve.
  2. Heat 50 g of the ghee in a heavy pan and fry the edible gum in small batches until each piece puffs up and turns white. Drain, cool, and crush coarsely.
  3. Add the remaining ghee to the pan with the sieved flour and roast over a low heat, stirring constantly, for 25 to 30 minutes, until deep golden and strongly nutty.
  4. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the dry ginger, ganthoda, nutmeg, cardamom, crushed gum, and almonds.
  5. Warm the jaggery with the water just until it melts, then stir it into the roasted flour and mix thoroughly while everything is still warm.
  6. Press the mixture into a greased tray about 2 cm deep, smooth the top, scatter over the pistachios, and press them in lightly.
  7. Leave to set for at least two hours, then cut into squares.

Notes

Ganthoda powder is sold in Gujarati and Indian grocers. If it is unavailable, increase the dry ginger slightly and add a pinch of ground black pepper. Adadiya pak keeps for three to four weeks in an airtight tin in a cool place. The coarse, semolina-textured urad flour sold as adadiya flour gives the right bite; very fine flour makes a pastier sweet.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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