Chikki

Chikki

Home-made chikki in ball form.
Course Snack
Place of origin India
Region or state Gujarat
Main ingredients Groundnut, jaggery
Cookbook:Chikki  Chikki

Chikki is a traditional ready-to-eat Indian sweet generally made from groundnuts and jaggery.[1] There are several different varieties of chikki in addition to the most common groundnut chikki. Each chikki is named depending upon the ingredients used. Usually, ingredients such as puffed or roasted Bengal gram, sesame, puffed rice, beaten rice, and Khobara (desiccated coconut) are used.

In regions of North India, especially Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this sweet is called Layyiya Patti. Similar dishes are also very popular in Brazil, where it is known as pé-de-moleque, and in Paraguay, where it is called Ka'í Ladrillo.

Ingredients

Exotic chikki assortment.

Some chikkis are made using a combination of these ingredients. Special chikkis are made out of cashews, almonds, and pistachios. Though jaggery is the usual sweetener material, sugar is used as the base in certain types of chikkis. It is a very popular sweet item in both rural and urban South Asia (spanning India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka). Some also add glucose to the chikkis, which are usual there. It just started from a single flavor of jaggery and peanuts. But today there are many different exotic flavors available in the market.

Similar preparations are made in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu with a larger proportion of nuts to jaggery and the mixture is formed into balls rather than slabs. The most common versions are kadalai urundai (peanut balls), ellu urundai (sesame balls) and pori urundai (puffed rice balls). In Kerala, it is made in both slab and ball forms. Peanut based sweet is called as kappalandi mithai and sesame based sweet is called as ellunda.

Preparation

The preparation of chikkis is very simple and consists of first preparing the hot jaggery syrup with a minimum of water, adding nuts to the syrup to coat them (with the syrup) and then transferring the nuts to a wooden mould, then rolling them to a thickness of about 6–8 mm using a wooden roller/and we also place in to the any steel plate for cooling, cutting into slabs and packing. In homes, smaller quantities are hand rolled with wooden rollers.

Most popular chikkis are sourced from the Indian towns of Lonavala, Matheran, Mahabaleshwar, Panchgani and Karjat near Mumbai.[2]

Homemade Chikki from Tamil Nadu
Homemade Chikki from Tamil Nadu

See also

References

  1. ↑ Chitrodia, Rucha Biju. "A low-cal twist to sweet sensations". THE TIMES OF INDIA. Retrieved 19 August 2012.
  2. ↑ Vaid, Molshree. "Chikki on a Sticky Wicket". THE TIMES OF INDIA. Retrieved 19 August 2012.

External links