Modhagam

This is my first post in the second year of blogging. On this first anniversary I thank WordPress team for their fantastic support, readers & fellow bloggers for their amazing encouragement and my family, relatives & friends for their kind cooperation, invaluable assistance & honest reviews. I also thank Lord Ganesha by posting the most appropriate recipe, a recipe for Modhagam that we usually offer to Him on his birthday (Ganseh Chathurthi). In this process of sharing our family recipes in here for the past one year, I have been learning much more than what I learnt through the years of my cooking experience. And now I am so glad to share a new method that I found very helpful for making soft silky dough for modhagam.

Modhagam is a traditional dumpling that we usually prepare on Ganesh Chathurthi. My childhood friend’s grandmother used to offer delicious modhagam to the deity at home on chathurthi thithi every month, and I still remember those soft melt-in-mouth modhagam with sweet fillings.

Modhagam Recipe:

Here I have posted modhagam of different shapes with various fillings so that you can try the one you like the most for the upcoming Ganesh Chathurthi. Let’s look into the recipe for modhagam :

Modhagam Dough: 

Dough making is the trickiest part in this recipe, since we all want our modhagam to be soft we need to use really hot boiling water to make the perfect dough. But it is quite difficult to handle the heat and also knead the dough without any lumps at the same time. Hence I use hand mixer with kneading attachment (as shown below) that comes in handy while mixing & kneading the hot dough with no hassle.

Ingredients:

1. Rice flour – 1 cup ( I used store-bought flour)
2. Water – 1 to 1½ cup
3. Salt – ¼ tsp
4. Sesame oil – 1 tsp

Cooking Method:

• Heat a pan with water.
• Add salt & oil into the boiled water.
• In a large mixing bowl add rice flour.
• Pour hot water over rice flour and mix them using hand mixer (at medium speed) until smooth.

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Tips for making the dough:

1. To avoid the dough becoming sticky, we need to pour water gradually and check its consistency while kneading. For 1 cup of rice flour I used 1 to 1½ cup of water, but you may have to adjust this depending on the water-absorbing quality of rice.
2. If you do not have hand mixer you can use a wooden spatula for mixing and knead well when your palm can withstand the heat.

Modhagam Fillings (pooranam):

Traditional Chickpeas fillings

First we need to cook chickpeas (Bengal gram or kadalai paruppu) until soft (not mushy) and grind into a powder before adding into jaggery syrup.

Nutty sesame fillings

We have to powder the sesame seeds after washing & dry roasting them and then mix them with powdered jaggery in medium flame.

Healthy greengram fillings 

We need to roast, pressure cook and mash lentils before adding jaggery syrup.

How to stuff the pooranam using modhagam mould:

Delicious coconut fillings

We can grind the coconut pieces into coarse powder using mixer grinder rather than using coconut grater or scraper.

Savory blackgram fillings 

First we have to soak lentils and grind into a coarse paste (without adding water) along with green chillies & ginger; you can steam or pressure cook this lentil mixture; cooked lentils can be refrigerated for an hour (as it helps to loosen them up) before adding into the tempering.

Tips for making pooranam:

1. If we add grated coconut into any filling whether sweet or savory, it enhances the flavor of modhagam.
2. We need to grease our hands and molds while forming the dough into desired shape.

Steaming modhagam:

We can grease the steam plate (or line the steam plate with wet cloth) and place the modhagam before steaming. It may be required to steam them for 5 to 7 minutes.

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Now delicious modhagam are ready to be offered to pillaiyar. You can also refer other recipes for Vinayagar Chathurthi here.