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Maladu (Fried or Roasted Gram Ladoo), is a delicious sweet and can be made on any occasions. This is a healthy sweet made from Fried Gram(Pottukadalai). This is a good evening snack for children too. I used to have a lot as a kids, just as an evening snack after coming from school. We can use jaggery in place of sugar to make it much more healthier. My mom sometimes just used to grind the roasted gram and sugar along with cardamom and give us like a powder instead of using ghee to make it into ladoos.

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Occasions we make Maladu:

For many festivals like Diwali, Maladu is one of the integral sweet. Its so easy and quick to make and there are no complexities involved. Most of our traditional sweets like Adhirasam, badusha or any other sugar or jaggery syrup based desserts, we need a little practice to get the right shape, taste and consistency, but Maladu is one easy recipe that has no complex procedures.

In my home town in Tirunelveli and also in Nagercoil, for occasions like marriages or for baby shower, we make maladu as Seer Bakshanam (gifts from the Brideside). The size that we make for seer bakshanam is way bigger than we make for other occasions. Seer bakshanam always shows our dignity and pride and we make it much bigger and best quality to show off our status and respect to the groom family.

Besan Ladoo Vs Maladu

Sometimes some of us gets confused with Besan ladoo and maladu. Besan ladoo is made with Gram flour and Maladu is made with Fried Gram Flour. For Besan ladoo, we fry the besan in ghee till we get strong aroma and also to get rid off its raw smell. But roasted gram doesn't need any cooking, we can just grind and use it as it is.

Other Easy ladoos to make:

3. Besan Ladoo

7. Sooji, Vermicelli & Poha Ladoo

Maladu Recipe

Recipe Card

Method with step by step picture for making Maladu:

Grind the Fried Gram(odachakadalai) along with sugar and cardamom in a mixer to a nice powder.

Take a sieve and sieve the ground fried gram with sugar once to make sure there are no lumps. Take the sieved gram flour in a mixing bowl. In a pan, heat a little amount of ghee and add the cashews and fry until it turns golden brown color and keep it aside.

Add the roasted cahsews to the roasted gram dal flour in the mixing bowl. Now heat the remaining ghee in a low flame.

To the mixing bowl, now add,1 ladle of ghee around the ground mixture and using a spoon mix the mixture well. Make sure that the ghee-gram dhal mixture is in a right consistency that lets you make small lemon sized balls. Do not add too much of ghee then we cannot make stiffer ladoos. Adding more ghee makes it easy for us to make ladoos but the ladoos would not be stiff and it will easliy become clumpsy. Adding very less ghee makes the ladoo crumble easily. So make one ladoo and check if the ladoos are stiffer if not add little more ghee and then try again

Now take small quantity of Fried Gram(odachakadalai) mixture and press it hard to make it like a small lemon sized ladoo. If you are planning to make lots of ladoos, better add ghee in batches of gram dal flour. Take the ground and sieved roasted gram dal flour in batches and then repeat the steps to make maladus.
Repeat the above steps for the remaining ground Fried Gram(odachakadalai) mixture.
The delicious Maladu is ready for serving. Store it in an air tight container.