Shankarpali / shakkarpara

Sweetened mix of flour & semolina deep fried in square or diamond shapes

          shankarpali or shakkarpara

Its Diwali time and am sure everybody is busy with preparing the diwali savories or pharal. Shankarpali as we call in marathi (its punjabi and gujrati cousins are called shakkar para) used to be and are one of my favourite among the diwali sweets. Obviously there need not be any other reason to make these at this time of the year, then of course diwali. But today I prepared them for the first time after coming to US. Last week had called up my grandmother to get some of the diwali recipes and this is one among them. These came out so good, soft, crunchy and crispy. The use of semolina or rava gave a nice crunch to the shankarpali.

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

1/2 cup semolina (fine rava/soji)

1/2 cup ghee

1/2 cup sugar(fine)

less than 1/2 cup milk

pinch of salt

oil for frying

Preparation Method:

A. To make the dough(time : 20 mins)

1. Mix the flour and semolina(fine rava) together into a steel vessel (use steel or any metal vessel because of the hot ghee that will be used, so do not use any plastic bowls)

2. Heat the ghee in a small vessel and pour it over the flour and rava mixture and mix well and then cool.(The ghee should be very hot. When you pour the ghee, you will see bubbles of flour.)

3. Add sugar and knead the dough with milk.(will not need more than 1/2 cup)

4. Make a nice soft dough and leave it covered for 30 minutes to 1 hour.

B. To make shankarpali (time: 20- 40 mins)

5. Take out a fistfull size of dough and roll it with rolling pin. Apply oil to the rolling pin and the rolling board.(Do not use flour)

6. Use a cutter to cut the pieces into square or diamond shapes as shown in the picture.(you see the uneven texture on the rolled dough, that is because I did not knead it well enough before rolling it, i did it for my second ball of dough but forgot to take the pic..my bad.)

7. Heat about two cups of oil in a kadai/skillet or frying vessel. The oil should not be very hot otherwise the shankarpalis will become dark brown but uncooked inside.

8. Keep heat on medium heat and deep fry the cut pieces.

9. Once they seem to light brown, remove them aside(these will continue to cook even after they are removed for few minutes)and follow step 5 -9  for the remaining batch of dough.

This is my entry to FIL -Ghee hosted by Sanghi.

Note:
Be careful while deep frying. I wouldn't mind saying to wear protective glasses
Secondly to check if the oil is hot enough, you can put a small piece of dough and check if it fries immediately.