Aluwa is a sweet rice cake made of rice flour. This is another delicious sweet made for Sinhala and Tamil New Year. Traditionally it is a sweet most suitable to eat with a cup of black tea. While most of the other sweets are fried, aluwa doesn’t use oil.
Following recipe is the most basic and classic Aluwa Sri Lankans make at their homes. However the optional ingredients will bring more taste and variety to your aluwa. At the very end of the recipe you will find how to make aluwa with desiccated coconuts and cashew nuts. (Image – https://foodvoyageur.com/)
Contents
Ingredients
- Brown Sugar 750g
- Rice flour 1kg
- Salt 1 tsp
- Desiccated coconut 400g (Optional)
- Toasted Cashew nuts 200 g (Optional)
- 2 cups of water
If you cannot find Rice Flour try this!
Take the necessary amount of raw rice. In this recipe, take 1kg of rice into a bowl.
Put water to cover the rice because we want to soak the rice for 6 – 10 hours. But don’t let it soak too much for like 24 hours because then it will be too soft.
Next, get a strainer and strain the rice. Let it sit for sometime to get rid of water as much as possible. Note that we cannot grind wet rice into flour.
Lastly, take your grinder and grind the rice finely into rice flour. Sift it through a sieve to make sure there are no clumps.
Now you can use freshly grinded rice flour to make Aluwa.
Instructions:
You will need
- Large pan (to toast rice flour)
- Large saucepan (to make sugar syrup and make the mixture)
- A wooden board
- Large spoon
How to make Aluwa
- First take a large pan and put the rice into the pan.
- Now keep it on medium high flame and toast the flour until it is evenly roasted.
- We are looking for a nice light brown color which means it is toasted just enough for Aluwa. After that, keep away toasted flour from the stove to cool down.
- Next take the sugar and put it into the large saucepan. Add water and stir it up.
- Keep the saucepan on the stove on medium heat. We are going to make sugar syrup.
- Keep stirring and when the sugar syrup is bubbling, take the pan off the heat.
- You can check the right consistency by taking a half a cup of water, dropping 2-3 drops of sugar syrup and if it spreads that means it is well done.
- Let it cool down for about 5 minutes. Check the temperature by dipping your finger because we must be able to flatten the mixture later with our hands.
- Then add salt to toasted rice flour. Keep one cup of flour separately nearby.
- Start adding and mixing rice flour into the sugar syrup part by part.
- Take the wooden board. Spread some flour that we kept aside earlier.
- Take the mixture out of the pan and flatten it on the board.
- Sprinkle more toasted flour on the flattened mixture. You will notice the mixture hardening quickly so we have to quickly cut it into squares.
- Take the container and store them carefully so as not to break the shape.
How to make Aluwa more tasty?
Add desiccated coconut and toasted peanuts into the sugar syrup right before taking the pan off the heat. Then continue making aluwa as mentioned above.
