The greatest trick sweet makes pulled off was convincing the entire world that making Mysore Pak was tough. It isn't.
Sure, it's quite labour intensive, but a little exercise never killed anybody. Consider it the calories you burn off before piling it all up with the sweet concoction you are about to make.
The problem with making Mysore Pak is not how much elbow grease you put into it, it is how precise you are with the timing. Keeping a watch on milk from boiling over is child's play compared to this. You let that golden yellow bubbly sweet mess on the stove for 1/16th of a second longer, and you end up with a piece of metamorphic rock.
While eating Mysore Pak is an otherworldly experience in itself, making it is quite magical in its own way. Because you can use a small amount of ingredients and still end up with a fuck ton of it. I learnt that trick accidentally. So don't use a big cup for the measurements, and use the same cup for all measurements. Measure them in the same order the ingredients are given in so you don't end up making a fool out of yourself in the end.
Ingredients:
1 cup of chickpea flour/besan/basic bitch facepack
2 cups sugar
3/4 cup water
Now wipe the cup with a dry towel
1 cup ghee
1 cup refined oil (or 2 cups of ghee and 0 cups of refined oil)
A big pinch of cardamom powder
Step 0: Grease a mold deep dish with a good amount of ghee and keep it handy.
Remaining steps:
The chickpea flour should be like cancer free breasts - no lumps. So sieve the flour and keep it aside.
Put the ghee-oil mixture in a small kadai and put it on simmer.
Dump the sugar and the water in a thick bottom kadai and put it on high heat until it begins to bubble like Varthur lake in the pre-COVID era. Stir occassionally, and check if the sugar syrup has reached the coveted 1-string consistency.
To do that, just stick your finger at the edge of the spatula where a little bit of the sticky mess sticks to your finger and pinch with your thumb. If just one string of appears as you separate your fingers then it's time. If more than one string appears, then you've gone too far and I don't know what you have to do because that has never happened to me.
Now lower the flame and begin by adding some of the chickpea flour - a couple of tablespoons to being with- to the sugar syrup, and whisk furiously. Ideally, there shouldn't be any lumps before adding the next batch, but we live in a less than ideal world, so fuck it.
Add the next batch. Stir. Next batch. Stir. So on and so forth until you are out of flour. Keep stirring until it becomes thick and separates at the bottom while you stir.
Sprinkle cardamom powder into this.
Now add a couple of ladles of the hot oil-ghee mixture. The yellow concoction should bubble like the 6th standard volcano project.
Stir some more until the oil-ghee has been absorbed. Then add some more of that hot oil-ghee mixture. Stir. Add more oil-ghee. Stir. You've done a similar process before, so you're used to this by now. Do this until you are out of oil.
Do not wait until all the oil is absorbed this time. Just as the bubbles subside, take it off the stove and carefully pour it into the greased dish. Gently tap the surface with the back of the spatula to level it.
Let it cool for some 5 minutes and cut it into desired shapes.
Leave it alone till it cools completely before removing the pieces.
The big question is - will this give you a nice, soft, melt in your mouth Mysore Pak or the thick, porus one that you get in petty angadi?
Neither. You get an unholy marriage of both. That's life. Deal with it.
Also, you apparently have to play around with the ghee-oil ratio and the amount of sugar used to get either one of those. Over time you'll figure it out.
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