Thekua

Chhath Puja, and the kitchen has been scrubbed and no onion has entered it. The thekua are made before dawn, pressed flat in the palm, marked with the back of a fork, and fried very slowly. They go into a bamboo soop and are carried to the riverbank for the evening arghya. They are also, plainly, one of the best sweet biscuits in India: crisp at the edge, dense and slightly chewy in the middle, warm with saunf and cardamom.

Two of our products carry it. Organic Jaggery is melted into a light syrup, strained and cooled completely, and it gives thekua both its deep brown colour and its round unrefined sweetness. Gir Cow's A2 Ghee is rubbed into the flour as moyan for a full two minutes until it looks like damp sand, and that rubbing is the difference between a thekua that snaps and one that thuds. For Chhath, fry them in ghee too. For an everyday batch, wooden cold pressed groundnut oil fries them beautifully.

The one rule: low flame, and let the colour build slowly. Six to eight minutes a batch. Thekua browns on the outside long before the middle is cooked, so a hot kadhai gives you dark biscuits that are still doughy in the centre.

How to make it

1. Put the jaggery and water in a small pan on low heat. Stir until it melts. Do not let it boil or thicken into a syrup. Pour it through a fine sieve to catch any grit, then leave it to cool completely. Warm syrup makes hard thekua.
2. In a wide bowl, mix the atta, sooji, coconut, crushed fennel, cardamom powder and salt.
3. Melt the 60 g ghee until it is warm, not hot, and pour it over the flour. Rub it through with your fingertips for a full 2 minutes, until the flour looks like damp sand and holds its shape when you press a fistful. This is the step that decides how crisp your thekua will be.
4. Add the cooled jaggery syrup a little at a time and bring the mixture together into a stiff dough. Do not knead it like roti dough. It should only just hold together. Cover and rest 15 minutes.
5. Break off lemon sized pieces. Roll each into a ball, then press it flat in your palm into an oval about 1 cm thick. Press a pattern in with the back of a fork, or use a wooden sancha if you have one.
6. Heat the ghee or groundnut oil in a kadhai on medium until a small piece of dough dropped in rises slowly to the surface in about 5 seconds. Lower the flame to low.
7. Slide in 4 or 5 thekua at a time, without crowding. Fry on low for 6 to 8 minutes, turning them twice, until they are an even deep reddish brown on both sides.
8. Lift them onto a wire rack rather than paper, so steam escapes from underneath and they stay crisp. Let them cool completely before you touch them. They harden as they cool.
9. Store in a dry airtight jar once fully cold.

Tips

• For Chhath prasad, thekua is made in a freshly washed kitchen with clean vessels, and traditionally it is not tasted while cooking. If you are making it as prasad, fry in ghee and keep a separate set of utensils for it.
• Strain the jaggery syrup. Even good gur carries fine sediment. Straining takes a minute and keeps small black specks out of the finished thekua.
• Storage: in a dry airtight jar at room temperature they keep 2 weeks and stay crisp. They go soft in humid weather, so do not store them near the stove or the sink.
• If your thekua came out soft or doughy, the oil was too hot. Deep brown outside plus raw inside always means high flame. Drop the heat and give each batch the full 6 to 8 minutes.
• If they crumble while shaping, the dough is too dry. Add the syrup a teaspoon at a time until it holds. Adding water instead will make them swell in the oil and go soft.