Fuh Gulha

We’ve received quite a number of requests for a Gulha recipe this Ramazan. So here it is. You can substitute the tuna can with an equal amount of valhomas and you can also skip the first step in this recipe where we dry roasted the flour; it makes the outer layer of the Gulha really crispy and tasty though.

Makes: around 20 Gulha

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups flour
• 2 tbsp. oil (for the dough)
• 20 tbsp. warm water
• 1 small onion
• ¼ lime (or to taste)
• ¼ githeyo mirus (or to taste)
• 3 curry leaves
• ½ tsp. grated ginger
• ½ cup grated coconut
• ¼ tsp. turmeric powder
• 1 tuna can
• Salt (to taste, the amounts we used are in the instructions)
• 2 cups oil (for frying)

Instructions:

1. Heat a pan, pour in the flour, and dry roast it until it loses it’s raw white colour; it doesn’t need to go all the way to brown. Once it’s roasted, remove from pan and let it cool down. Doing this gives a very nice flavour and crispiness to the gulha. But you can of course skip this step and just use the flour as it is.
2. In a bowl mix together the flour and the salt. We used about 1/3 tsp. Add the oil, mix again and then knead the dough while adding water gradually. We were able to get our dough smooth and nice with 20 tbsp. of water, but it might be different for you.
3. Slice the onion, githeyo mirus and curry leaves thinly.
4. In a bowl, and using your fingers, squeeze and squash the sliced onions together with the lime and the githeyo mirus.
5. When the onion slices feels soft and they’ve released their juices, add the grated coconut, curry leaves, ginger and turmeric and give it another good mixing.
6. Finally add the tuna. Make sure you drain the tuna well before you add it, and mix everything together really well. We also added 1/3 tsp. salt in this step.
7. Make little balls from the mixture by rolling portions of the mixture between your palms. We were able to make 20.
8. Pinch off a piece of the dough mixture, using your fingers, roll it into a ball and then flatten it out a bit into the shape of a cup or a very tiny bowl.
9. Place one of the tuna balls in the centre of the piece of dough. And then close it down and roll it into a ball. Make sure there are no gaps or places where the tuna mixture is showing.
10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 until you run out of dough and tuna mixture.
11. Heat the oil in a pot or pan. We fried our gulha with 2 cups of oil. But the important thing here is that when the gulha are frying, they are submerged at least halfway.
12. Place the gulha in the heated oil. We used a small piece of dough to check whether the oil has heated; when the piece began to float and had bubbles forming around it, it was our cue to put the gulha in. We fried ours in two batches. When frying, keep the heat on medium. One way you can gauge the temperature of the oil is by looking at the bubbles that form around the gulha as they fry. If the bubbles are appearing at a medium speed, it’s all good.
13. Fry the gulha until they take on that nice golden gulha colour. You might need to turn them around a bit to ensure all sides are fried evenly.