Gulra is a Jammu sweet-tasting delicacy with its significance buried deep in the local culture. It's not too dissimilar from something we covered not too long ago - Sundh - however, this is a little less nuanced and with a lot fewer ingredients. Traditionally (and this is going back a long time) but jars of Gulra were basically travel food for the bride and the travel party as they made their journey to her new home, which could be a few miles away or in a different village altogether. Along with Gulra were some more Dogri delicacies such as Kyoor and Malpoore - dishes I'll hopefully cover in a post in the not too distant future.
With a combination of a healthy serving of nuts, coconut and ghee, it kept the travellers satiated for a good amount of time.
The ingredients and process listed below probably took me somewhere between half an hour to an hour to prepare from scratch and it'll probably last you for a good few weeks, even if you have generous daily servings.
Ingredients
For this recipe, you will need
Grated coconut - approx 5 tbsp
Suji/Semolina - around 200g
Sugar - 65g. The ratio of semolina to sugar is approximately 3:1
25g almonds - Ideally not roasted or salted
25g cashew - Ideally not roasted or salted
Cardamom pods - around 5 or 6
Ghee/Clarified butter - 5 tbsp and then another 2 tbsp.
The process
If you find parallels between this post and the one on sundh, don't be surprised, there's a lot of common ideas between them.
We start off by adding the sugar and the cardamom pods into a spice blender and blending them together into a nice powder. If there's a few coarse pieces, that's fine. You're allowed to go as coarse or as fine as you like. Once done, transfer the contents into a mixing bowl and keep aside.
In a frying pan, heat up 5 tbsp of ghee.
Fry the almonds in the ghee for around a minute and then take them out. Pat them dry with a paper towel and keep aside.
Now, we fry the cashews in the same ghee. Just like the almonds, we take them out after a minute, pat them dry on a paper towel and keep aside.
Add in the coconut now. The coconut will suck up all the ghee in the pan. Once that's done, take the coconut out of the pan and transfer it into the mixing bowl.
We then 2 tbsp ghee into the pan.
Once the ghee has melted, we add the semolina and mix it nicely. The semolina will also suck up the ghee like the coconut. When that's happened, empty the pan and mix the semolina with the coconut.
Crush the almonds and cashew nuts with a pestle and mortar until they're at your desired levels of coarseness
Add the crushed cashews and almonds into the mixing bowl. Mix well and you're done.
It's a nice snack to have around the house. If you ever give this a go, do let us know in the comments how it goes, we'd love to hear your experience. See you all in the next post.