Every Telugu home had a steel dabba that you were not supposed to open.
It lived on the top shelf, behind the rice tin, and it held Amma’s Sunnundalu. You could smell it before you saw it, that deep, toasty warmth of urad dal roasted slow on a low flame until it turned the colour of old gold. She never measured anything. She just knew. A handful of minapappu, a fistful of jaggery or sugar, ghee poured until the dough “felt right” in her palm, and then those hands, sure and faster than ours will ever be, pressing the warm mixture into perfect roundels while it was still almost too hot to touch. We used to ask her how she got them so smooth. She’d laugh and say the secret wasn’t in the recipe. It was rolling.
There is a quiet science to a good Sunnundalu that machines have never quite managed. The dal has to be roasted to exactly the right point. A shade too little and it tastes raw; a shade too much and it turns bitter. The ghee has to be enough to bind but never so much that it weeps. And the laddu has to be shaped while warm, by hand, because the heat of the palm is part of how it holds together. This is kai-pakkuvam, the deftness of the hand, and it is not something you can write down in a recipe card.
At Sitara, this is the standard we hold ourselves to. Our Bellam Minapa Sunnundalu is made the way our mothers made it, with jaggery instead of sugar, so the sweetness arrives slow and round and a little earthy, the taste most of us actually grew up on. For those who prefer the cleaner, brighter sweetness, our Sugar Minapa Sunnundalu keeps the same toasted-dal soul. Both are rolled by our elderly rural staff, women who have been making these by hand for decades and who, frankly, are far better at it than any of us.
And then there is the laddu we are quietly proud of. So many of our customers wrote to us with the same heartbreak: a father, a mother, someone they love has been told by the doctor to give up sweets. For a Telugu family, that is not a small thing. Sweets are how we welcome, how we celebrate, how we say I’m thinking of you. So we made a Sugar-Free Minapa Sunnundalu, the full taste of the original, made for diabetic families, so that nobody at the table has to sit out the celebration.
That is really what a Sunnundalu has always been. Not just a sweet. A way of measuring love in roundels, one warm handful at a time.
We can’t put Amma’s hands in a box. But we’ve found the next best thing: the hands of women who learned the very same way she did.
Taste the Sunnundalu Amma used to hide on the top shelf → shop our Sweets collection.