Othla's Homemade Sweets

A homemade Indian sweet, made properly, is a specific and stubborn thing. Real ghee. Unrefined jaggery or clean cane sugar. Fresh dry fruits. Time — always more time than the packet-mithai industry can afford. This shelf is our attempt at keeping some of those sweets alive in Bengaluru, made by people who still cook them the slow way.

Every mithai here is made in small home kitchens across Karnataka and neighbouring states — chikki set on a marble slab, ragi laddoos rolled by hand with jaggery and cardamom, sesame til-gud, dry-fruit ladoos with A2 cows' ghee, sunnundalu from Andhra roasted the day they're rolled. When Diwali or Sankranti approaches, our makers open extra hours, but the recipe stays the same — nothing is scaled to a mass-production line.

The traditional Indian sweetmeat carries a specific nutritional idea we've mostly lost track of — sesame in winter for warmth, jaggery for iron, ghee for lubrication and slow-release energy, dry fruits for the immunity-heavy months. Grandmothers weren't inventing "superfoods"; they were following a food calendar that lined up with the body's actual needs across the year. We stock these sweets partly because they're delicious and partly because they belong in that older, more useful rhythm.

Every mithai on this shelf is made with cow ghee (not vanaspati), unrefined jaggery or raw cane sugar (not white refined), and fresh whole nuts (not chopped-nut mixes with cheap fillers). Shelf life is deliberately short — most keep two to three weeks refrigerated. Explore below — every sweet on this page is one we would send to a friend's family for a festival.