One of the best things about Indian culture is the food. In particular, there are some savory Indian snacks that everyone should try at least one in their lifetime. One such snack is the Murukku. which is also called Chakli. Murukku is a black lentil and rice flour snack. To make this snack, a dough made of water, ghee, rice flour, salt, cumin and chili is mixed together and kneaded into a spiral shape. Then they are fried and voila! You have a crispy and crunchy snack.

If you don’t know how to make that spiral shape, watch this video. The woman in the video makes a spiral shape by stretching the dough around a bottle cap and twisting the dough around it. It’s actually a pretty neat idea:

It takes some skill and practice to make it into that shape. There’s an easier solution, and that’s to use a murukku making apparatus like the video below. It’s an app where you load the dough and squeeze the dough out to form a spiral shape. The apparatus will not only form the shape of a spiral; it will make the finely serrated edges that Murukku is known for. This is because the apparatus has a star shaped hole from which the spiral is squeezed out. Otherwise without the apparatus, you’ll have to twist the dough in addition to making it a spiral. It’s just like the woman did with the bottle cap.

There’s a very similar snack to Murukku called Sakinalu. It’s pretty much made the same way, but the Sakinalu is a speciality from the Telangana region. Like Murukku it’s made of rice flour and spices like cumin and cardamom seeds. It’s especially made for special occasions like religious festivals. Here is a video where someone is making it by hand. As you can see it’s time consuming and requires a bit of patience: