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For hassle-free festive cooking, look no further than the top chefs on YouTube. Nisha Madhulika and Ranveer Brar. They show that the trick to make a wide variety of Diwali namkeens is to play with their shapes without changing the dough.
Three types of Namak Pare
There is little doubt that Nisha Madhulika is the queen of Indian cooking on YouTube. Every recipe she shares is filled with helpful recommendations on how to make it better. Her knack for picking the right dishes for a specific purpose and demystifying the trickiest cooking method for home chefs and have earned her a stupendous following of 12 million subscribers on the social media platform. For Diwali, she simplified namkeen by sharing three different varieties of namak pare—square, cashew-shaped and long nimki-shaped—with dough that's kneaded with a generous amount of ajwain. It’s a spice known to help digest fried foods. All it takes is 30 minutes for the dough to rest and an additional 30 to 40 minutes for the savouries to be fried. Within a matter of one and a half hours, you will have dabbas full of crispy spicy Diwali snacks.
Five snacks, one dough recipe
Celebrity chef Ranveer Brar shows that you can make five snacks with one dough recipe under 10 minutes. It almost sounds like magic, so let’s double the time for amateurs. In the video, all he does is prepare a dough with a mix of flours like gram flour and poha powder, throws in some spices like ginger and chilli, and kneads with oil and water. It forms the base for kodubale, kulkul, muruku and two types of papdi. There are no moulds needed as he hand-rolls the muruku and uses a fork for the kulkul which are shaped like gnocchi. These are the kind of snacks that will make your Diwali happy indeed.
