Puran Poli/Holige

When its Sankranthi festival how can you forget about “Puran Poli” its sweet paratha and is generally prepared in Maharashtra. This is a classical Marathi dish which is served as dessert / sweet item during the festival season. The stuffing is known as ‘Puran’ and outer cover is known as poli. In Karnataka it is called as “Huranada Holige”. It is made from Bengal gram and Jaggery. Preparing holige needs lots of patience and concentration. My mom prepares it with much care and sees that it does not break and it becomes very soft. Even I still haven’t learn the way of preparing poli perfectly. We will see below the step by step procedure to prepare this. The measurement I am sharing here is for 1 kg Bengal gram which from which we can prepare upto 20 -22 poli.

Ingredients:

Split Bengal gram	1 kg
Wheat flour	1 kg
Maida	100gms
Salt	Pinch of
Cardamom powder	½  table spoon
Oil	3-4 tea spoon
Nutmeg powder	Pinch of
Water	2 – 2.5 liters
Ghee	For toasting

  

1. Take 1 kg of wheat flour and 100gms of maida, add pinch of salt, 3-4 tea spoons of oil. Add little water at a time and knead this into smooth dough. The dough should be little loose as compared that with the usual dough we prepare for regular chapatis. Cover this with cotton cloth and allow it for rest.
2. Take a kilo of split Bengal gram wash it thoroughly, Add 2 to 2.5 liters of water and keep it for boil in a pressure cooker for upto 4 vissels / or you can boil the Bengal gram in a traditional way that we follow for boiling toor dal usal as explained earlier in an open vessel.
3. Check if the dal is boiled properly with your finger tips. Drain all the water from boiled dal and keep it a side (this water can be used for preparing kattina saru / kattachi amti - a kind of sambar).
4. In the same cooker add ½ kg sugar and ½ kg jaggery, pinch of nutmeg powder and  half a spoon of cardamom powder. Cook this until jaggery and sugar gets melted and gets mixed well with dal for 10-15 mins . This turns dal to golden brown color and it becomes dry concentrated mixture.
5. Take this out and grind it to smooth puran, My mom usually uses a puran making machine because in grinder we do not get smooth puran and there will be some dal particles left.
6. Make small balls of dough, dust little flour and roll out the dough into small circle. Keep a spoon of puran stuffing at the center and seal the dough with the stuffing inside. 
7.  Dust little flour and roll out the dough with stuffing into circles. Do not apply too much pressure the stuffing might come out. 
8. Heat the tawa and place rolled poli over it and heat on moderate flame, apply ghee over both sides. Heat it until it becomes golden brown color. 
9. This can be served with ghee, a bowl of milk or guloni (a sweet made from boiling water, milk, and little amount of sugar and pinch of cardamom powder).

Notes:

Make sure that you don’t over boil the dal as we do for sambar, you should be able to hold the grains in hand. So it’s always better to boil it in open vessel and we can check in between if it’s boiled properly.

If you do not have jaggery you can use sugar alone the ratio of Bengal gram to sugar/jaggery should be 1:1.