Ingredients (makes around 15 medium sized cookies):
- Whole Wheat Flour (3/4th cup)
- Maida (All Purpose Flour) (1/4th cup)
- Baking Powder (a pinch)
- Misri/Rock Sugar (1/3 cup (mildly sweet) to 1/2 cup (very sweet))
- Cardamom seeds (1)
- Cinnamon powder (a pinch)
- Ghee (less than 1/2 cup)
Method:
- Grind the rock sugar, cardamom and cinnamon powder finely.
- Mix whole wheat flour, maida, baking powder, and ground sugar well.
- Melt the ghee and add little by little into the flour mixture, trying to form a dough. Don’t add all the ghee at one time.
- You should end up with a dough that holds its shape.
- Preheat the oven to 375 F.
- Grease a baking tray with ghee and dust it with a tiny bit of flour.
- Make tiny balls of a size that you are comfortable with. Slightly flatten the balls on the baking tray.
- Using a toothpick, make a design (optional) of your choice on the dough. Garnish with powdered nuts or whole nuts or like I did, with the powdered sugar, cardamom mix, if you have some remaining.
- Bake for 12-14 minutes. You might want to check once at the 9 minute mark and then decide how much more time you want to continue baking the nan khatais.
- When you start seeing a golden brown color on the sides, the nan khatais are ready to be taken out of the oven. Don’t wait till you see a dark brown color.
- Let the cookies cool for 10 minutes at least, before attempting to take them out of the baking tray.
- Store in an air-tight container after the nan khatais are completely cool.
Tastes (Rasa):
Sweet (flours, ghee, misri), sour (none), salty (none), bitter (none), pungent (cardamom), astringent (none).
Doshic Influence:
This is definitely a kapha aggravating dish in excess. Addition of ghee increases digestibility and tridoshic nature of the recipe. Addition of pungent spices like cardamom and cinnamon mitigates some of the kaphaness, adds flavor and makes it more digestible. Using rock sugar instead of refined sugar is good for all doshas and also eliminates the need to add a processed and refined food like white sugar.
Effects on the Mind (Gunas):
These nan khatais are quite sattvic and nourishing, in moderation.