Moong dal halwa – ICC December

When I heard about this Halwa from Valli for this month’s ICC challenge, for the first time I can’t imagine a halwa with a dal. But she insisted that they taste the best! Never even seen or heard about it before I was not ready to scale up the recipe as I wanted to make a small batch.

The day before making I soaked the dal in the night. After the overnight soaking it was easy to grind with little sprinkling of water. I started off with all t ingredients mixed up in th stove top and start stirring. After 10 minutes I could see I am no where near the end and my arms were already tired. My sweet sis came to my help and the halwa is made by her from that point.

The taste was really good and I could not find out that it is a dal halwa. Everybody at home liked it. But the stirring part makes me afraid of doing it again as the solid mass demanded lots of arm power to get stirred continuously.

The arms behind all the stirring…

Not-so perfectly moulded halwa ….

Thanks Valli for the nice challenge! She said that its made in winter to warm up our body! Yeah it did it! We all loved it!

They tasted really good…

I used the Recipe 2 with just the dal

Split (Yellow) Moong dhal – 1 cup
Ghee – 1/2 cup
Sugar – 3/4 cups to 1 cup (as per required sweetness)
Milk – 1/2 cup (Notes from Lataji – instead of water for the sugar, this gives the khoya added taste, Simran’s recipe asked for water)
Cashews/ raisins roasted in ghee for garnish.

Method to Prepare:

Soak 1 cup moong dal 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.

Notes :

• Use a thick bottom pan or better nonstick pan
• Don’t leave the halwa unattended. The dal can stick and it can go from just done to burnt in a second so keep stirring as much as possible. You should remember to keep stirring to prevent dhal from sticking irrespective of the ghee added.
• You aren’t looking for the halwa to get too thick when you turn off the heat. It was thicken as it cools.
• Cook until ghee surfaces on the sides and the halwa attains a very nice shine.
• Initially, it may appear that all the ghee is being used up. But as the dhal cooks the ghee separates. So the ghee measure is sufficient.
• In both recipes depending on how you got the moong dal paste, you may require slightly more ghee to get the texture
• Though original recipe didn’t call for roasting the dhal before soaking, Lataji felt roasting it a bit gives more fragrance.

Thanks Valli for yet another challenge!