Methi ladoo

Methi ladoo is the winter sweet of North Indian homes: roasted whole wheat atta bound with ghee and jaggery, with roasted fenugreek seed powder for its bitter, aromatic note. The bitterness is the point, kept in balance by the jaggery, and the ladoo is made small because a little methi goes a long way.

The atta is roasted in ghee until it smells nutty; the methi powder gets only a minute on its own, because burnt methi turns the whole batch bitter. Jaggery goes in off the heat, while the mixture is still warm, so it melts into the atta instead of caramelising, and the laddus are pressed while the ghee is soft enough to bind them.

Dried kasuri methi leaves make a greener, milder kasuri methi laddu in place of the seed powder, though the nutrition below follows the seed version. This is a dry sweet, so it keeps for weeks in a jar in cool weather, the way winter sweets are meant to. For the other classic atta-and-ghee winter mix, see our panjiri recipe, which keeps the methi out and the nuts in.