Moong Dal Halwa

When the December challenge for ICC was announced to be 'Moong Dal Halwa', I was happy since I had never tried this before. I am glad I made it since everyone loved it at home. There isn't much to write, so I'll get to the recipe.

Ingredients:
Split (Yellow) Moong dal - 1 cup
Ghee - 1/2 cup
Sugar - 3/4 cups to 1 cup (as per required sweetness)
Milk - 1/2 cup
Cashews/ raisins roasted in ghee for garnish.
Cardamom powder - 8 pods of cardamom powdered.

Method:
Dry roast the dal and then soak in water overnight. Next morning, grind to a paste.
Heat a heavy Kadai, take initially only 1/2 of the ghee and heat it.
Add the dhal and stir continuously, not allowing lumps to form. This part is very tricky as the dhal cooks really fast, irrespective of the ghee.
Keep the heat at the lowest and keep stirring even after the dhal becomes thick.
Add the rest of the ghee intermittently and cook the dhal until aromatic and the ghee starts oozing out.
Meanwhile mix the sugar with water/ milk in a pan and bring to a boil. Add this slowly to the cooking dhal.
Keep the fir low at all times and break lumps if formed while adding the sugar and water/ milk mix.
Cook until the ghee surfaces.Garnish with cashews and raisins.

My Notes:
Recipe did not say if I could use water to grind the dal or not. So, I ground it with almost no water and due to this, dal got cooked too fast. Next time, I'll make it into idli batter consistency so that dal has more time to marry ghee. What I did was take half the ghee, roast cashews and raisins and when done, keep it in a bowl. Heat the rest of the ghee in the same pan and when ready to add ghee, just add it from the set aside bowl. I did not feel the halwa was too sweet or anything. Next time, I might increase the sugar to 1 1/4 cup since I felt it lacked the sweetness it should have. All in all, a very nice recipe to keep making.

Happy Cooking!! Pin It