Mohanthal

Mohanthal (મોહનથાળ) is an Indian sweet made by roasting chickpea flour in ghee and combining it with sugar syrup. It is popular in Gujarat and Rajasthan. Some versions are set fairly thick and cut into squares or diamonds, while others are left soft and scooped from the dish. The aroma of roasted pulses spreads as you eat it, and it has a crumbly texture, with fine granules remaining within a smooth mass.

Mohanthal cut into squares. Photo: Dkgohil, 2015; location unknown. Original image used (Source, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Making granules before roasting

The main ingredient, besan, is flour ground from chickpeas. Mohanthal involves a preparatory step in which a small amount of milk and ghee is rubbed into this flour to form small lumps. In this step, called dhabo, the resulting lumps are passed through a coarse sieve to even out the size of the granules before roasting. These granules leave a crumbly texture in the finished sweet.

The granules are roasted in a pan of melted ghee, with constant stirring, to bring out a light brown color and aroma. Ghee is a milk fat obtained by removing the water and milk solids from butter or similar products. Depending on the method, mawa, which is milk cooked down until thick, is added at this point to layer in dairy flavor. Some versions are flavored with saffron or cardamom and scattered with almonds, pistachios, or charoli.

Ghee in a container. Photo: Neha Sonal, 2015; location unknown. Original image used (Source, CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Shah family of Gujarat makes mohanthal for Diwali by adding separately roasted mawa before combining it with the syrup. This family treats mawa as an ingredient that can be left out, but says they include it for the festival. Versions with mawa are sometimes described as the Rajasthani method, but there are Gujarati households, like this one, that add it as well.

Adding the syrup, cooling, and cutting

In a typical method, sugar is boiled with water to make a syrup, which is then mixed with the roasted flour. In some methods the syrup is added to the flour; in others the roasted flour is added to the syrup. The thick syrup and chickpea flour are mixed until the mixture thickens, then spread on a ghee-greased plate. Cutting it once it has cooled and set gives pieces that are easy to share as gifts or offerings. How firm the finished sweet is varies by method, and in some cases it is eaten while still warm.

How it differs from Mysore pak, laddu, and magaj

Even among sweets that use the same besan, ghee, and sugar, the process differs from Mysore pak and from laddu, which is shaped into balls. Some Mysore pak is made by combining syrup and flour, then adding fat, to produce a texture full of small holes like a honeycomb. Although both are chickpea-flour sweets, its cut surface looks different from that of mohanthal, which is made from granules. The magaj made by the Shah family mentioned above is made by cooling roasted chickpea flour and nuts, mixing in powdered sugar, and shaping the mixture into balls. Because there is no step of boiling a syrup, the way the sugar is added differs from mohanthal. However, some magaj is also square or granular, so the two cannot be told apart by shape alone.

Besan laddu shaped into balls. Photo: Moulikjoshi91, 2015; location: Uttarakhand, India, based on the source’s location data. Original image used (Source, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Celebration platters and offerings

Mohanthal is served at wedding meals and given as a Diwali gift, and it is sometimes made as an offering to Krishna. It is also made for Janmashtami, which celebrates Krishna’s birth, and during Navratri. Shrinathdham, which shares methods for preparing offerings with devotees of Shrinathji, describes an example of making mohanthal for the spring festival of Basant Panchami, cutting it into diamonds, and offering it to the goddess Saraswati and to Krishna. One tradition links the name to Mohan, another name for Krishna, but this does not indicate when the sweet originated.

Garnishes and firmness vary from household to household and from maker to maker, and both platters of cut pieces and soft offerings have their own methods. Even among seven makers around Anand in Gujarat, the proportions of chickpea flour, ghee, and milk and the roasting time differ. There is no single fixed formula for each state.

Mohanthal served on the sweets table at WikiConference India 2023 in Hyderabad, India. Photo: Wasiul Bahar, 2023. Original image used (Source, CC BY-SA 4.0).

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