Tirupati prasadam

Srivari Laddu (Tirupati laddu)

A dense, fist-sized sweet of gram flour, ghee, sugar, cashews and cardamom. The recipe has not changed since 1715; it is baked in the temple's own Potu kitchen, where around six hundred cooks work in shifts and up to three hundred thousand laddus come out in a day. In 2009 it became the first Indian sweet to receive a protected geographical indication: nowhere else in the world may a sweet legally be sold as a Tirupati laddu. Everyone who completes darshan gets one free with their token; the rest are bought at TTD counters at a fixed price. People carry it home not as a souvenir but to share; that is what prasadam is.

Handed out and sold right after darshan, at the counters just outside the temple. The temple kitchen makes them continuously, hundreds of thousands a day.