Sweets built on gram flour begin with a long, patient roast in ghee before any sugar appears. That stage decides the flavor and the texture of everything that follows.
Raw legume flour tastes wrong
Gram flour is milled from split chickpeas, and untoasted it carries a raw, faintly bitter beaniness that sugar cannot mask. It reads as unfinished rather than mild.
Roasting drives that off and replaces it with a nutty aroma. The change is dramatic enough that the same flour appears to be a different ingredient before and after.
Cooks judge the stage by smell rather than by color, since the flour darkens gradually and unevenly while the aroma shifts sharply at a definite point.
Fat is the medium, not an addition
The flour is roasted in ghee rather than dry, so every particle is coated. That coating conducts heat evenly and stops the outside scorching before the inside cooks.
Coated starch also behaves differently later. Fat around each grain limits how much water reaches it, which is what keeps the finished sweet crumbly rather than pasty.
The quantity of fat is therefore not adjustable in the way it might be elsewhere. Reducing it changes the roast and the set, not merely the richness.
Protein makes it behave unlike wheat flour
Gram flour carries far more protein than wheat flour and no gluten at all. It cannot build elastic structure, so texture comes from particles bound by fat and sugar.
That is why these sweets crumble cleanly instead of tearing. There is nothing holding the mass together except the coating around each particle.
It also means the flour absorbs liquid quickly and then stops. Batters made with it thicken abruptly rather than gradually as wheat batters do.
Sugar arrives after the roast is complete
Adding sugar early stalls the roast, since the moisture and the melting sugar lower the pan temperature and the flour steams instead of toasting.
Once the roast is done, sugar sets the final texture as it cools and recrystallizes, gripping the fat-coated flour into a solid that breaks under a fingertip.
How the sugar is introduced decides the grain of the finished sweet, since crystals stirred in dry set differently from sugar dissolved in water and cooked into the mixture.
Buying and storing it
Indian groceries sell it as besan, sometimes in coarse and fine grinds that behave differently. Chickpea flour on an American natural-foods shelf is usually the same product under another name.
Because it carries fat-bearing legume material, it goes stale faster than wheat flour. A rancid note in the bag will survive the roast and ruin the sweet.
Smelling the flour before starting is the cheapest quality check available, and a bag that smells flat rather than sweet and beany is better kept for savory batters.