Besan
Also known as: gram flour, chickpea flour, garbanzo flour
What Besan is
Gram flour — chana dal milled fine — the flour behind pakora batter, besan chilla and besan laddoo. Naturally gluten-free, since it comes from a chickpea and not wheat, though the jar still needs to say so if that matters to you.
Flour ground from split desi chickpeas, which makes it yellower, denser and stronger-flavoured than the pale garbanzo flour milled from kabuli chickpeas in Western health-food shops — close cousins, not the same product. It contains no gluten, but it is often packed on lines that handle wheat, so jars meant for coeliacs are labelled explicitly. Chickpea-flour cooking is old and wide: the socca of Nice and the farinata of Liguria are the same idea on another coast.
Taste and texture
Earthy and nutty with a faint, pleasant bitterness — gram flour tastes of something, unlike neutral wheat flour. In batter it fries to a shatter-crisp shell; cooked as a paste it sets dense and fudgy, which is exactly the texture of a good laddoo.
Forms to buy
- Fine-milled (standard) — For pakora batter, chilla and most sweets.
- Coarse-milled — Some brands mill it rougher; gives laddoo a less pasty crumb.
How to cook it
For pakora, whisk besan with water to a thick coating batter, rest it 10 minutes, season with salt, chilli and ajwain, then dip vegetables and fry. For besan chilla, thin the batter until it pours like crepe batter and cook it flat on a pan. For laddoo, roast the besan in ghee until it smells nutty before any sugar goes in. Sev, the crunchy noodles scattered over chaat, is besan paste forced through a die into hot oil.
Buying note
Typically ¥400–¥600 per kilogram. Fresh besan smells sweet and nutty; old besan turns bitter and flat. Buy small bags, keep them airtight, and use the flour within a couple of months — it does not improve with age.