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Recipe: Perchance, Passion Fruit – Vegan Passion Fruit Shrikhand

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A friend and I were on a weekend getaway in the hills when another friend, who coincidentally had embarked on the same idea of a little escape to the same sleepy town, dropped by to visit us. We were enjoying each others’ company and trying to pep up the meal we would share, wanting to make it as fancy as possible with the simple but fresh ingredients at our disposal. There was a lot of yoghurt on hand, and perchance, some luscious passion fruit. Voilà, inspiration struck! We were quick to leap into action and put together a beautiful shrikhand for dessert, and even quicker to polish it off as we caught up on our conversation.

Both passion fruit and shrikhand have been celebrated on this blog before, and bringing them together felt like a lovely stroke of luck. Passion fruit always has a short season, so I suggest that you take advantage of the same and try this recipe as soon as you find the fruit. It truly is one of the most beloved fruits in my home, as you may remember from this recipe for a passion fruit salad dressing that I still make as often as possible. At the very least, sliced passion fruit or passion fruit juice is a daily feature whenever we’re able to get a fresh harvest.

While I had prepared this dish using dairy while on the getaway, once I got back home I tried it again in a vegan preparation. I had initially wanted to make a vegan version of the coconut pudding that was shared last week, but wasn’t able to do enough trials due to the festive rush. So this time, what I am sharing is a tried and tested vegan dessert, made with coconut yoghurt.

Quite like the sitaphal kheer that needs very little to enhance it, being so flavourful on its own, the passion fruit shrikhand too does not need the the usual frills of a typical or traditional shrikand. It doesn’t need saffron or slivers of almond or pistachio to elevate it. All I used was a little bit of cardamom. The focus is very much on the taste of the fruit, which happens to be quite sweet, and this means that you can cut down on the sugar quantity used in the dish.

Gujaratis take pride in our shrikhand, and it is even eaten as part of a main meal in a great combination known as shrikhand-poori (I’ve written many times on this blog about that famous Gujarati sweet tooth!). So while I don’t want to make an easy comparison to flavoured yoghurts you can get in supermarkets, I can definitely say after this experiment that it’s very easy to flavour your shrikhand too, using different kinds of fruits. It’s very easy to prepare overall, too. The best part of it is that being homemade, we know exactly what goes into it. A flavoured shrikhand is a healthy treat, and a fun and simple way to add a twist to this immensely popular Gujarati dish.

 

Vegan Passion Fruit Shrikhand

(Yield: 4-5 cups)

5 cups coconut yoghurt

½ cup icing sugar (substitute: ½ cup honey or maple syrup)

¼ teaspoon cardamom

Pulp of 2 passion fruits

 

Take a fine muslin cloth, put the 5 cups of coconut yoghurt into it and tie the cloth. Use plain yoghurt if you prefer a vegetarian rather than vegan version. Hang this yoghurt for about 2-3 hours or until all the whey drips out. You can use this whey to bind dough for rotis.

Then, put the yoghurt into a strainer and add the sugar to it. Sieve the yoghurt with the help of a spoon and collect it into a bowl. Add the cardamom powder and passion fruit pulp. Mix well.

You may garnish the bowl with a pinch more of cardamom and some lovely passion fruit seeds. Serve chilled.

While you can use almost any fruit as flavouring, there’s just something about a naturally sweet one such as passion fruit that brings this dessert together so beautifully. Do be sure to take advantage of the season for it.

We returned from our trip to the hills with lots of fruits, bringing bags of avocado and passion fruit back to our urban lives. The cooler climes really do have such an interesting variety of produce, and if you have access to these at the moment, I’d love for you to check out some other posts using peas, plums, strawberries and peaches. Fruits had been such an integral part of our meals on our getaway, and usually made up our entire breakfasts too. Given the nutrition quotient of this food category, I think I’m going to keep looking more deeply into bringing more fruits into more dishes, innovatively…

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Recipes

Recipe: Topped With A Tang – Salad With Passion Fruit Dressing

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I hope you enjoyed my previous post, in which I gave away the recipe for one of re:store’s bestsellers. As mentioned then, I was on a stop motion video kick and was determined to produce at least a couple of those cute videos, with Anushka’s help to bring everything all together, of course. The chocolate cupcakes were the first star, and I must admit they were the more difficult to shoot of the two dishes I had zeroed in on for this experiment. The second one (the recipe for which I am sharing today) was much easier to shoot, perhaps because the composition was within a single bowl and the overall motion was more stable, and I love the result.

Before we go any further, here it is: the stop motion video for this recipe, a delicious salad with passion fruit dressing.

As you can see, with the shoot for this video, I wanted the dark and moody theme that I usually use in my photography to be reflected too. I also wanted to showcase what a stop motion video looks like when the recipe is simpler, as opposed to the more complex chocolate cupcakes one. As for whether or not I was looking for a contrast between tastes, health quotient and so on – honestly, not really. In this experiment, it was my aesthetic side that took over and determined my choices more than my culinary side.

At the moment, we are enjoying a bounty of hydroponically-grown varieties of greens in Chennai. This form of small-scale agriculture seems to be all the rage in the city, and as we grow some of our own produce ourselves, and as I personally always have an eye on natural and nourishing ingredients, we couldn’t be more pleased by this trend. These organic vegetables grow without soil, and so suffer less from worms and other issues. We have so much at home at the moment that I’ve been making lots of green smoothies and salads. For this recipe, you can use any kind of lettuce that you have available.

When it comes to salad dressings, those of us who opt for healthier dressings tend to stay with the simple staples like lemon, salt or pepper, but I’ve found a way to retain the health aspect while increasing the flavour of the dressing. This is where the passion fruit comes in.

Whenever a fruit or vegetable retains its foreign name on the market, and doesn’t have a commonly used local Tamil or other Indian name, I know that it’s something that has only in the recent past been cultivated here. So it is with passion fruit, and this post by a fellow food blogger has lots of information about the supply we get here in India, which is grown in the hilly regions.

Long before I began to enjoy this taste, there used to be a passion fruit shrub at our house in Kotagiri. Not having learned yet how much I love it, I would simply give away its yield to our neighbours. The plant is long gone now, but how I wish I had eaten that bounty while I could! I feel this now all the more because passion fruit has a very short growing season here in India. Just in case you happen to try this recipe at a time when it’s scarce on the market, rest assured that you can use a store-bought syrup instead of fresh pulp too. While it may contain added sugars or other ingredients I prefer to avoid, the taste will be the same. It’s the fruit’s unique flavour that really elevates this salad. Passion fruit has a slightly sour flavour and a high citric content, and it goes very well with crunchy apples. The two fruits complement each other, with their mix of textures and tastes. They have a beautiful contrast when put together here.

Passion fruit is a hardy fruit, not very pretty in appearance, but slice it open and you’ll find just the opposite. Its soft pulp looks just lovely speckled with black seeds. My husband loves having some for breakfast whenever it’s in season, slicing it in half, sprinkling some sugar on top, and scooping the flesh out with a spoon. As for me, I enjoy the juice very much and even make it daily when I can. It’s a healthy ingredient, one that’s great to start the day with, and we make ample use of it whenever we get our hands on some. Luckily, I had enough left over during the last passion fruit spree to make it the star of this salad…

 

Salad With Passion Fruit Dressing

(Yield: 1 bowl)

 

Dressing

½ cup passion fruit pulp

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon honey

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Salt to taste

 

Salad

2 cups lettuce

¼ cup finely cut spring onions

½ apple (core and sliced)

2 tablespoons chopped dates

2 tablespoons toasted pumpkin seeds

 

Simply put the salad ingredients together in a bowl and set them aside. Then, whisk the ingredients of the dressing until they are blended well. Pour this over the salad before you serve it. Enjoy!

Sometimes, there really is nothing else easier to prepare than a salad. I’m a huge fan of the food format itself, as you may know, and here are several you may also enjoy: mango salad, millet salad and sundal.

Salads are a great way to increase your vegetable intake, and they give you a boost especially as a mid-day meal that keeps you light on your feet but sated. Do try this one out and let me know what you think? Before I forget, here’s another look at the stop motion video that started off the idea for this post! In case you missed it, do check out my cupcakes recipe too, and the stop motion video that accompanied it. If you use the app, I’m looking forward to connecting on Instagram too.

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