Enthaligai: WHEAT HALWA (GODHUMA HALWA)

It's going to be a fortnight since Deepavali is over here but still I am full tight with house chores and never find any time to spend on blogging. A lot of posts has been in the hand to blog, of course.

I know it is quite late to post the deepavali recipes but I thought its better late than never and my purpose of blogging was to document my experience and experiments of my kitchen rather than an urge to post the recipes. I have to manage home, work, and house chores which takes a higher priority than this as usual. Also it had been raining like cats and dogs in Chennai whole last week and first time in history all IT companies declared an emergency holiday due to the flood situation and there were frequent power cuts and network issues. There was knee level water everywhere and it was a memorable experience to us.

Moving on to the recipe, I was longing to prepare this halwa for a long time and was bit hesitant to try it without supervision of Mom for some reasons. Since Mom was here for Deepavali, I requested her to lend a helping hand as I also thought to take step by step pictures for blogging purposes and she readily agreed. The outcome was perfect and whole family enjoyed it. It is a bit elaborative process but worth trying it. I suggest you to try in small quantity as it involves long time stirring.

DH suggested that had the sweetness be little less, it would have been even more delicious so I suggest you to try lessening the sugar a bit based on your family sweet tooth.

Ingredients:

Samba Wheat - 2 cups

Sugar - 5 cups

Ghee: 2.5 cups

Artificial color powder - a pinch (optional)

Cashew nuts - 20

To Grind:

Sugar: 5 tsp

Cardomom - 5-7

Preparation:

1. Wash and soak the whole wheat overnight (~8 hours).

2. Drain the water to a vessel, and grind it adding little by little water. Filter it using a metal strainer and again grind the remaining pulp with remaining water and strain again. Repeat this until all the milk is taken from the wheat berries. Mostly in two strains, the pulp would be without milk.

3. Keep the collected milk aside for 6-8 hours undisturbed. This process would separate the milk and water.

4. Before the start of the process, filter the water which is settled at the top carefully.

5. In a mixer, powder finely 5 tsp of sugar and cardamom.

6. Fry the cashews in little ghee.

7. In a heavy bottomed vessel, add sugar with little water and switch on the flame and keep stirring.

8. Once all the sugar granules are dissolved fully, add the extracted wheat milk and keep stirring. After sometime, slowly the color starts to change beautifully as and when the sugar and milk gets cooked.

9. If you feel like adding food color, add the coloring powder at this time. Add the powdered sugar-cardamom mixture and keep stirring.

10. Slowly the halwa will go on to the semi solid state. Add ghee little by little. The ghee will be absorbed immediately, hence add little by little.

11. At one stage, the whole halwa will start to thicken and the ghee would not be absorbed anymore. You could see the glossy look and crystallized sugar sedimentation at the top of the halwa. This is the right consistency to switch off the flame.