Pori Urundai is a crunchy, crispy, light, delicious, easy ladoo recipe which gets ready in minutes made with puffed rice. These are also known as Murmura Laddu and Puri Unde.
First grate/powder the jaggery, powder the green cardamoms and keep them ready.
Keep your pans ready. This will make the process super simple.
I used one pot to melt the jaggery, strained the cleaned jaggery into another pot.
You will need two separate pans - one to dry roast the murmura/puffed rice, another to heat the cleaned jaggery and making ladoos. Instead you can use the same pan to roast and later to heat jaggery. Keep a small bowl of water ready. This is for checking the thickness of the syrup.
Making murmura laddu mixture
Now, on medium heat dry roast the murmura/ pori or puffed rice for 1 to 2 minutes, so that it crisps up. Keep this aside or transfer to another bowl.
To a separate pot, add ½ cup of the grated/powdered jaggery and 4 tablespoons of water.
Heat this until with constant stirring all the jaggery melts and gets mixed with the water. Turn off the heat.
Now, pass the melted jaggery through a sieve to remove impurities. Collect the clean melted jaggery in another pot/container.
Now, pour this clean jaggery mixture into a pan and heat on a low flame. Keep stirring the mixture.
Add cardamom powder and continue to stir.
After a couple of minutes, if you hold up the ladle with drops of the syrup falling back into the pan, the last drop should form a sort of string as it falls. Keep checking the thickness as the syrup heats.
To ascertain the thickness of the syrup, add a couple of drops into a bowl of water. The droplets should not dissolve into the water.
You should be able to pick up the drop which will form a soft to firm ball. This is the right consistency.
Now, pour this prepared syrup into the murmura/puffed rice. Instead you can reduce the heat of the heated syrup pan and add murmura/puffed rice into the prepared syrup. If doing for the first time, I would suggest, pour the puffed rice into the jaggery syrup, mix, then make laddus.
Add roasted gram, mix everything very well using a spatula.
Making pori urundai
The ladoo have to be prepared when the pori urundai mixture is still hot, otherwise the mixture will harden and making ladoo will be difficult.
Wet your palms slightly with water, pick up a portion of the prepared mixture and form ladoo by pressing gently between your palms and giving it a spherical shape.
Prepare ladoo with the rest of the mixture in the same manner.
If towards the end the mixture becomes too hard, put the pan back on gentle heat for a few seconds. This will loosen the mixture allowing ladoo formation.
Serve Pori Urundai as offering to the deities or serve as a sweet snack.
Notes
You can also use puffed flattened rice/puffed poha instead of puffed rice. This may need less jaggery or you may slightly increase the quantity of puffed flattened rice. I have used roasted gram in addition to puffed rice in the recipe. This is optional.
The consistency/thickness of the jaggery syrup while preparing the ladoos is important. It should be of a soft to firm ball consistency. If it becomes any harder, making ladoos will be difficult. If its thinner, the ladoos will come apart easily with a stringy syrup attached.
As soon as the ladoos are made they harden and become crisp if the consistency of the syrup is right.
Once prepared, keep them at room temperature until they cool completely. They can then be stored in an air tight container for weeks. They even make good edible, home-made gifts.