Besan Chilla
A gram flour pancake with vegetables grated into the batter — no soaking, no fermenting, the first one on the plate in half an hour.
Cooked and tested by Kiran · 25 August 2026
- Hands on
- 11 min
- Total
- 21 min
- Serves
- 4
- Difficulty
- easy
Half an hour from a cold kitchen to the first chilla, ten minutes of which the batter spends resting. Grate whatever vegetable is going soft in the fridge into it — the besan carries all of them.
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Ingredients
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Method
Whisk the besan with about half the water first, into a lump-free paste, and only then thin it out with the rest. Besan tipped into a full bowl of water clumps immediately and no amount of whisking afterwards gets those lumps out.
Look for: Smooth and the thickness of pouring cream.
3–5 min · bowl
Stir in the grated carrot, onion, coriander, ginger, turmeric, ajwain and salt. Grate the vegetables fine — anything chunky sits proud of a thin batter and stops the chilla lying flat on the tawa.
Look for: The vegetables are suspended evenly through the batter rather than sitting on the surface.
5–8 min · bowl
Give it ten minutes. The besan hydrates and the salt pulls water out of the onion, so check the consistency again afterwards — it usually needs loosening.
Look for: Thicker than when you left it, with the vegetables beginning to settle. Whisk and thin with water back to pouring cream.
10–15 min · bowl
Get the tawa properly hot over medium, wipe it with oil, then pour a ladle into the middle and spread it outward in a spiral with the back of the ladle. Work quickly — besan sets fast and a batter that starts setting mid-spiral gives you a chilla with a ridge through it.
Look for: The top loses its wet shine and turns matte, the edges lift away from the tawa on their own, and a spatula slides underneath without resistance. If it grips, give it another thirty seconds.
2–3 min · medium heat · tawa
Drizzle a little oil around the rim, flip, and press the chilla flat. The second side wants roughly half the time of the first.
Look for: Golden-brown patches across the face and no raw besan smell — that smell going is the reliable signal, more than the colour is.
1–2 min · medium heat · tawa
For a box, roll each chilla into a cylinder while it is still warm and flexible, then let the rolls cool before the lid goes on. Rolled, it is a thing a small child can hold; flat and cold it needs cutting up.
About this dish
Chilla goes by a dozen names — pudla in Gujarat, cheela across the north — and the constant is besan, water and whatever vegetable is in the fridge grated small. It is the fastest thing in this collection because gram flour needs neither soaking nor fermenting: unlike a rice-and-dal batter, it is ready the moment it is smooth. It is worth knowing that besan behaves like a batter and a binder at once, which is why a chilla holds together with no egg and no leavening. It also means an over-thick batter produces something closer to a dense pancake than a chilla, so the consistency note in the first step is doing real work.