Description
The pounded sesame sweet of Gaya
When winter settles over the temple town of Gaya, the lanes around Ramna and Tekari Road fill with a rhythmic, hollow knocking — the sound of wooden mallets pounding sesame into jaggery. That sound is tilkut. The name itself says it: til for sesame, kut for pounded. For well over a century, Gaya’s halwais have made this Makar Sankranti delicacy by hand, and no name carries more weight among them than Sriram.
The craft looks simple and is anything but. Jaggery or sugar is cooked to an exact thread-like consistency, pulled while warm, and rolled into small discs. Roasted white sesame is then beaten into each disc on a wooden block, mallet stroke after mallet stroke, until the seeds bind into a dry, flaky, layered sweet that shatters cleanly between your teeth. Pound too little and it stays sticky; too much and it turns to powder. The window is narrow, and reading it correctly is what separates Gaya tilkut from every imitation sold elsewhere.
The reward is a sweet unlike any other in the Indian repertoire — not chewy like chikki, not soft like a laddu, but airy and brittle, deeply nutty from the toasted til, with a clean jaggery sweetness that never sits heavy. It is winter food in the truest sense: warming, energising, and made for sharing over Sankranti bonfires and family visits.
We source ours from Gaya itself, freshly made and packed to keep that signature crispness intact. Store it airtight in a cool, dry place and let each piece dissolve slowly — that is how Gaya has eaten it for generations.
- Net weight: 500g
- Shelf life: 45 days
- Ingredients: Roasted sesame seeds, jaggery, sugar
- Made in Gaya, Bihar — no preservatives or artificial colours
From the makers
Sriram Tilkut — second-generation halwai shop on Ramna Road, Gaya. Operating since 1955. The Sriram family hand-pounds sesame seeds and jaggery in stone mortars the old way — no machine grinding, no fillers. Gaya tilkut earned its GI tag in 2023. We source directly from their original Ramna shop, the same stall their grandfather opened.
