Munthiri Kothu is a unique festival sweet from Kanyakumari District for Christmas.First I came to know about this sweet through my x-office collegue.When I heard the name, first I thought its a rich sweet made with whole bunch of cashews(as we call cashews as mundhiri in tamil) so asked her for the recipe.Somehow it got missed last year too, so this year I browsed around for the recipe and found that it is more like our seeyam the main difference being green gram dal stuffing.Hubby is not fond of green gram dal so had only one,but I loved it so much.The crispy outside with a crunchy sweet inside, it tasted so good, glad that I tried it.
I was also looking for some traditional christmas recipes to post this year and this was an apt choice.I made the green gram dal and coconut mixture alone the previous night itself then morning mixed everything,shaped into balls and deep fried it because with the lil boy aside cant manago to do everything at one go 🙂
Munthiri Kothu Recipe
Recipe Category: Main | Recipe Cuisine: South Indian | Reference: yummyoyummy
Whole Green Gram Dal – 1/2 cup
Jaggery – 1/3 cup
Coconut – 1/2 cup grated
Cardamom – 1
Oil – to deep fry
For the batter:
Homemade Rice Flour – 1/3 cup
Turmeric Powder – 1/4 tsp
Salt – to taste
Water – as needed
Method:
- Soak jaggery in warm water(till immersing level) , crush it well. Then heat it up until it is slightly thick (no string consistency needs to be checked).Strain and keep aside.(I made more than above mentioned quantity for storing purpose).
- Dry roast green gram till golden brown.Cool down then tranfer to mixer.
- Grind it to a coarse(rice rava texture) mixture,Set aside.Dry roast coconut till golden brown,Set aside to cool.
- Grind it once.Now in a mixing bowl, add both the mixtures along with cardamom powder.Mix well.
- Take jaggery syrup in a pan and heat it up, when its thick honey like in consistency, add green gram and coconut mixture and switch off.Slowly mix it up.
- Keep mixing till the jaggery syrup is coated well.When its still warm make small lemon sized balls.Set aside for atleast 30mins.
- Meanwhile make the outer coating batter.In a mixing bowl take rice flour along with turmeric powder and salt.Add water little by little  to form a smooth batter slightly thinner than idli batter consistency.
- Take a ball dip in the batter, roll it so that the batter coats on all sides.Heat oil in pan – when theoil is hot , drop the balls carefully.You can combine 2-3 balls and fry to get a bunch.
- Fry until golden, this may take 2-3mins.I fried it in batches.Drain in tissue paper.
Kothu means bunch the sweet is made into balls in bunches hence the name.You can either make individual medium sized balls or make bunches like these and fry them.Updated these pics with bunches as one of my reader asked me to.
My Notes:
- It is a must to keep the balls aside for resting time before you start frying else it will crumble.
- If you are not able to make balls, then jaggery syrup is not at the right consistency.
- This keeps well for 2-3 weeks.
- It is best to use homemade rice flour but if you do not have you can go ahead with store bought idiyappam flour.
Yes, this is a common sweet in most Christians house during Christmas. But, we r bored now….nice to see the recipe in ur blog….however, we remove the skin of green gram and then grind it….cardamom adds extra flavor…..another sweet common in our area is " achi murukku" made with rice flour, eggs and sugar
We hold 3 balls together and dip in batter and fry. So it looks like punch of grapes and called munthiri kothu.
interesting
It's a traditional receipe that we make for the seemandam function
But in our native they make with karupati and grind the rice batter in grinder
Very healthy and traditional Indian Christmas recipe.. Love to see jaggery based recipes during Christmas time 🙂
Nice.. Actually i was looking for recipes for long time… thank u for posting .. My amma(Mother-in-Law) is from Srilanka and she makes this often and it is very common festival sweets in Srilankan Tamils
I have never heard about it..looks yum
Simple and healthy recipe
But if no cashews are used then why it’s called as Munthiri kothu?
they use to dip three balls together to look like grapes ..and so it is called munthiri kothu here munthiri is grapes not cashew.