For a third year in a row I made the same distressed phone call to my mom yet again "but may be its a really tiny step in the recipe that you missed telling me last time! Why doesn't my til-gul ever turn out like yours?!?". You probably got the context right, after tries and tries of tilgul (til=sesame seeds, gul=jaggery/unrefined sugar, tilgul is a traditional Indian sweet made from sesame seeds and jaggery) somehow my tilgul just never comes out right (officially I have blamed it on the quality of jaggery available here btw :D)! My mom makes the best tilgul ever and I have taken her recipe, read and re-read it, even double-checked the instructions from Ruchira! (For all the non-Marathi folks out there, Ruchira is like a bible of Marathi cooking! I got my copy as a wedding gift from my grandmother who was sleeplessly worried of how I'll ever manage cooking an eatable dinner for my husband :D). Anyway, so I tried and tried but always the jaggery would make the tilgul either too soft or too hard! Now mind you it would taste yummy just the texture would suffer and my poor husband would always encourage me by saying "stomach knows only tasty" :)
So, this time when I made the same phone call last weekend my mom had her answer ready "Just skip gul, use sugar, that will surely work". Hmmm, tilgul without gul! Then she told me a recipe of a tilgul that I had very much liked as a kid and seeing as that one did not have jaggery, I decided that may be it wasn't the craziest of ideas to make tilgul with sugar! And what do you know, this was by far my best til-gul.. ever! In all fairness though it should be called sesame tikki or sesame snaps but hey, today is Sankranti and I have a til-sweet for you, thats all that counts, right?!
(Follow the read more link below for the rest of the recipe...)
