Chikki

Chikki (चिक्की) is an Indian sweet made by binding roasted nuts or seeds with boiled-down gur or sugar. The best-known version contains peanuts. It is spread into a thin slab and cut into squares, and the pieces are eaten by snapping them with the teeth. The hard sugar and the peanut pieces break apart together, and the roasted aroma and sweetness spread through the mouth.

Roasting the nuts and boiling the sugar

The peanuts are first roasted, then their skins are removed, and they are split if needed. Whole nuts, halves, and finely crushed pieces each give a different bite, even in slabs of the same thickness. Large pieces make the feel of biting into peanuts distinct, while fine pieces mix more evenly with the sugar. Sesame, cashews, almonds, dried coconut, and puffed amaranth are also used, and the variants are distinguished by adding the ingredient’s name to the sweet’s name.

Gur is a minimally refined sugar made mainly by boiling down the juice of sugarcane and similar plants. The sugar is melted and boiled down until it is concentrated enough to snap as a slab. After it is combined with the roasted peanuts, the mixture is spread out before it cools and sets. Sugar that retains a lot of moisture tends to be sticky, while boiled-down sugar hardens as it cools, so the concentration at the end of boiling determines how well the pieces hold together and how cleanly the chikki snaps.

The warm mixture is turned out onto a board, rolled out to an even thickness, and scored. The order is to shape it while the nuts and sugar can still move, and then to cool it so that it sets. In large-scale production, roasting the peanuts, splitting them, boiling the sugar, and rolling and cutting thin slabs are each done with machines suited to the task. The home process, done with a pot and a rolling pin, has been divided into separate tasks to match the volume of production.

Local combinations of nuts and sugar

Chikki is not limited to versions made only with peanuts and gur. Some use refined sugar, some mix in sesame or other nuts, and some feature grains as the main ingredient, and the color and the way the slab breaks vary as well. If you compare a product made with crushed peanuts with a sesame product, both the size of the pieces encased in sugar and the aroma that lingers in the mouth differ.

Similar sweets are found throughout South Asia. Kadalai mittai in Tamil-speaking regions and kappalandi mittai in Kerala are names for sweets of peanuts bound with sugar. Gajak, the name used in northern India, includes versions in which sesame and sugar are worked together. In addition to differences in regional names, there are also differences in method, such as whether the pieces are left intact or crushed and worked into the mixture.

In Kovilpatti, Tamil Nadu, kadalai mittai was registered as a geographical indication in 2020. According to an account connected to the association of its manufacturers and sellers, the sweet was originally made at village festivals from locally grown peanuts and palm sugar; in the 1940s, a grocer named Ponnambala Nadar is said to have made it with sugarcane sugar and changed its form from balls to rectangles cut into pieces.

Some of today’s products use peanuts from nearby Aruppukottai and soft gur from Theni, and are decorated with finely shredded colored coconut. This history, a change from balls at village festivals to rectangles cut and sold in shops, shows that places other than Lonavala also have trades that developed peanut-sugar confections.

Lonavala in Maharashtra is a town known for making chikki and for souvenirs. The flow of visitors from Mumbai and Pune by rail and by highway is linked to the trade in portable slab sweets. Among the local manufacturers are shops that offer many products by ingredient, such as peanuts, sesame, cashews, and grains. The name chikki is closely associated with this town, but sweets made by binding nuts with sugar cover a broader range and are found throughout India.

Maganlal, a long-established business in Lonavala, dates its history from 1880. Its shop history includes a story of serving chikki on teak leaves to railway workers. The shop’s history tells of selling to working people, while its current range also meets the demand for souvenirs from visitors to the town.

Besides changing the ingredients, some home methods add a small amount of spice. The peanut chikki on Odoranai Indojin to Odoru Nihonjin (The Indian Who Doesn’t Dance and the Japanese Who Does), a blog about family life and cooking between Japan and India, adds crushed cardamom and fennel seeds to gur and peanuts. Because the way sugar boils down changes when the ingredients change, the writer also notes that, when using a different gur, the same 5 minutes over low heat boiled it down too far. This is an example of why you need to watch the state of the sugar rather than setting a single fixed time.

Two components that change in storage

In storing chikki, both the hardness of the sugar and the fats in the nuts are concerns. Sweets high in sugar tend to become sticky with humidity, while the fats in peanuts change with time and temperature. Packaging is used both to keep out moisture from outside and to preserve the flavor of the nuts.

At India’s Central Food Technological Research Institute, chikki based on standard peanut chikki but formulated with soy protein and added nutrients has also been studied. Storage tests examined changes in hardness and fats depending on temperature. These show that even a sweet that seems to consist of just two kinds of ingredients, sugar and nuts, differs according to its formulation and storage conditions. Research formulations with added nutrients are also a modern development that makes use of the structure of a slab sweet in which sugar binds the pieces.

Glossary