Poli – is a traditional sweet generally made during the festive days. It needs very less ingredients to prepare – it contains pulse giving the essential nutrients for us and we use a natural sweetener called jaggery, that will go soft with even elderly and diabetic people. Its a snack that will be enjoyed by people of all ages.
Ingredients
We can make 6 to 8 poli with this measure
For making base
- Maida – 250 grams
- Turmeric – 2 pinches
- Oil – 50 ml (groundnut or refined oil can be used)
- Salt – 2 pinches
For preparing the Stuffing
- Jaggery – 300 grams
- Water – 100 ml
- Cardamom – 5
- Ghee – 2 tablespoons
- Yellow Gram – 250 grams
Things to do before we start cooking
- Soak 250 grams of yellowgram for 4 hours.
- Break the solid chunks of jaggery to fine pieces (or try to powder it). Keep them aside in a bowl.
- Break 5 cardamoms with our hands, to small pieces. Keep them ready in a small bowl.
Steps to Prepare
- Place a 3-litre pan on the small burner – turn on the flame and keep it in HIGH Mode.
- Pour in 500 ml water. Then add the 250 grams of yellowgram (that was soaked for 4 hours) to pan. Close the pan with a lid. Let the water boil and yellowgram get cooked till it becomes soft.
- In the meanwhile, lets prepare the dough.
- Take a wide mouth vessel, put in the below 3 items –
- 250 grams of maida.
- Salt – 2 pinches (less than 1/4 tablespoon)
- Turmeric powder – 2 pinches (pinch means less than 1/4 tablespoon)
- With bare hands, start stirring and mixing the maida along with salt and turmeric powder. Then, make a small pit in the middle of flour and pour 50ml oil and a little of water (50 ml) in that small pit.
- Make small rotations with hand so that maida mixes well with water and oil and at the end we get a soft dough.
- Pour a little oil (say 50 ml) over the dough and around it – let the dough soak in oil for 10 minutes. Now, let’s check the yellowgram, if it has cooked, water will be completely dry and the dal will be very soft.
- Transfer the cooked dal to our mixy jar, grind it to a coarse powder. Never add water while grinding.
- Place pan on the burner, turn the flame to LOW mode, then add the below –
- Jaggery – 300 grams (broken to smaller pieces)
- Water – 100 ml
- Stir till all the jaggery powder dissolves in water and then turn flame to high mode. Continue stirring till water boils well. Then turn the flame to low mode.
- Now,
- add the powdered cardamom (5 pieces) to the jaggery mix in pan.
- add the powdered yellowgram to the jaggery mix.
- Start stirring well for 20 seconds.
- Pour in 2 tablespoons of ghee to the pan. Stir continuously till the contents in pan become a little dry and suitable to make laddoo. Then, turn off the flame.
- Let the sweet mixture in pan cool down to room temperature. This sweet mixture thus obtained is called “Poornam”.
- Once poornam gets cooled down – apply oil to both palms and take a little from the poornam, roll it between your palms to make medium sized laddoos. Repeat this step to make ball (laddoos) of all the poornam.
- Take a banana leaf, grease the banana leaf and place a portion of the dough on it. Spread it with your fingers into a small disc and place the poornam on it. Close the edges.
- With your fingers greased generously with oil gently make polis and make it into a disc shaped one.
- Heat a tawa and keep it in a very low flame. Once the tawa heats up well, slowly transfer the banana leaf onto the tawa and take it out gently.
- Cook on both sides and smear a tablespoon of ghee and repeat the same for rest of the dough and poornam.
