I was guided through this recipe by one of my Indian Students, so it is very traditional.
Ingredients
- 1.5kg New Guinea bean, peeled and deseeded
- 350g jaggery
- 400ml coconut milk
- 250g rice flour
- 1 teaspoon cardamom
- 50g yellow split peas
- Raw cashews, toasted for garnish
Method
- Cut New Guinea Bean into fine dice and steam until softened.
- Melt Jaggery in a separate pan.
- Add Softened and drained new guinea bean to a large frying pan and slowly add melted jaggery, stirring constantly until combined, add rice flour and continue to stir to cook out the rawness of the flour and combine the sugar, continue to stir, add coconut milk.
- This step is quite tedious, continue to stir until it balls around the pan and the flour taste cooks out (we did this stirring for approximately 1 hour) this step is very important to caramelise the jaggery.
- While stirring, toast the yellow split peas.
- After about 1 hour of stirring, add split peas.
- Line a loaf tin with baking paper and add halva and push air out and firm down and smooth out into loaf tin.
- Allow 2 hours to set and then turn out onto board and garnish with toasted cashews.
Although this recipe is traditional, next time I will omit the split peas and add toasted cashews or pistachios to the mix to make it closer to the original Greek halva.
Recipe courtesy of Heather Hristovski
Note:
Some, but not all recipes on this website are Sophie’s Patch originals. At Sophie’s Patch we share cake recipes developed by Sophie, and recipes for other foods that we love that are published and developed by other cooks and chefs. These are tried, trusted, simple and accessible recipes for any level of cook. Pastry, bread and cakes are a science with recipes available for sharing and while there may be minor changes between cooks and publications the recipes are repeated and replicated many times.
