Muruku for Indian Cooking Challenge

We are making crunchy fried Murukus for this edition of Indian Cooking Challenge. These are probably the most time consuming, yet the tastiest muruku’s I’ve ever made.

I made a couple of changes to Srivalli’s recipe, not to the recipe, but the way I prepped my ingredients. After consulting with my mom: I soaked the rice the night before and shade dried it for half an hour before I grind it into a powder. I then used a sieve to sift the ground flour to get only the fine flour and blend and sifted it couple of times. According to my mom, the more you soak the rice the smoother & softer is the flour. Apart from that I followed the recipe to the T. Here is the recipe verbatim from Srivalli.

Ingredients:
Raw Rice - 4 cups
Urad Dal - 1 cup
Water - app 1/2 cup or more

For Seasoning:
Cumin seeds - 1 tsp
Sesame seeds- 1 tsp
Asafetida/ Hing - 1/2 tsp
Salt to taste
Butter - 75 gms (I used 4tbsp butter)

Method:

• Wash and drain the rice. Shade dry the Rice for 1/2 hr. (I soaked the rice overnight and shade dried in the morning for 30minutes to 1hour.)
  
• Dry roast the Urad dal to light brown. Allow it to cool.
  
• First grind rice into a fine flour, keep it aside. Then grind the urad dal to fine powder. (I sifted both the flours couple of times and used the finer flour for murukus)
  
• In a wide vessel, take both the flours along with salt. Mix well. Add cumin, Sesame seeds to the flour, mix well.
  
• Whether you use Asafetida powder or the solid ones, you got to mix it in water, make sure it is dissolved before adding to the flour. If its not dissolved properly, when deep frying the muruku, there are chances for the hing to burst our due to air bubbles. Mix in the hing to the flour and finally add the butter.
  
• Gather everything well and you will get more of a crumbling mixture. Now slowly add water and knead dough which is little softer than the puri dough.
  
• Heat a kadai with oil enough to deep fry. Once the oil is hot enough, simmer to low flame.
• Take the Muruku Aachu, wash and wipe it clean. Then divide the dough into equal balls. Fill the Muruku maker with the dough. You can either press it directly over the flames or press over a paper and gently slide it down the hot oil. But since the quantity mentioned here is less, you can press it directly over the kadai. Cook over medium flame, using a slotted spoon, turn it over to other side to ensure both sides turn golden colour. You will know by seeing the colour that it’s cooked. Remove to a kitchen paper and store it in a air tight container. This normally stays good for weeks, provided you forget about these which hardly happen!