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Recipe: A Sweet Finish – Coconut Pudding

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And so, the coconut series comes to a sweet finish with a dessert, just in time for Diwali! The first time that I had this coconut pudding was at a friend’s potluck, a long time ago. I had not yet started re:store then or become known for my baking, and so my standard contribution was always some kind of traditional Gujarati fare, like a kachori or a dal dhokli. Each of us would bring something, and we would partake in a lovely and diverse feast together. It was at one such gathering that I first encountered this sublime coconut pudding. Whose preparation it was, and at whose house, blurs in my mind. Every one of the posts in this series (podi, oil and stew) has involved the inspiration of one or several friends of mine, and while I wish I could recall exactly who inspired this one, I can say with certainty that my friendships were a big part of it too.

Despite forgetting the other details, I still remember vividly that first coconut pudding itself. It looked very pleasing to the eye, giving off a sense that it would be cool and refreshing. The first spoonful confirmed my expectations. It was just fabulous, and tasted so light. I can recall that it was summer at the time, but the elements and sensations of the dish are the same no matter when in the year you have it. It is simply a delight.

Every Diwali, I usually prepare the ghugra that my mother taught me, as well as boondi. This year, given the circumstances, I wanted to create something lighter, something that would not only have a subtle flavour but would also feel more breezy overall. I also wanted something that would be consumed quickly, given that we cannot have guests for days on end as we usually do. The coconut pudding was perfect on all counts. With the exception of the ceremonial laapsi, there are no other sweets at home for Diwali this year.

But rest assured that we are, finally, in a celebratory mood, and I hope very much that you are too. I have had an instinct for a while now that November would be the turning point when things would begin to get better. The news of Joe Biden being elected the next President of the USA seems to usher the good times in, and as I have American family members, the feeling of hope is quite close to home. Moreover, our Gujarati New Year is also around the corner. This time of year is always a new chapter for us, and the number of lovely traditional dishes I’ve linked from my native cuisine in this post also honours the same.

To return to the uplifting and delicious star of our Diwali this year, this coconut pudding… While I can’t remember who brought this dish to the potluck where I fell in love with it, or who shared their recipe with me afterwards, I’ve been making it for years. You may recall an earlier rendition, with chia seeds, here. This is a different version, and the twist here is rose – re:store’s most preferred flavour, as many of you who have made orders with me know. Somehow, a rose represents so many things at once: love, coolness, fragrance, birth, death, celebration and more. It is a universal symbol, and a timeless flavour. One of the things I love most about roses is that they are locally available and very accessible. It’s so easy for me to bring that aroma and those soft petals into my day.

 

Coconut Pudding

(Yield: Serves 4-6)

1 cup condensed milk

½ cup cream

1½ cups coconut milk

11 grams agar agar

¾ cup water

1½ tablespoons rose water

 

Place a saucepan with the water and the agar agar on a double boiler. Stir until the agar agar melts and becomes translucent. Cool and strain.

The method for this dish is quite simple, but agar agar – which is a vegetarian substitute for gelatin – is a bit tricky to work with. If required, add another cup of water while melting it.

Making sure that all the other ingredients are at room temperature, mix them well together. Add the strained agar agar at the end. Pour into cups or moulds.

Leave to set in the refrigerator, and serve chilled. I hope that this dish uplifts your mood as much as it does mine.

I am lighting a lamp this Diwali to wish you all the best for a hopeful and healthy 2021. Even though we have not yet become able to open our homes in the ways we used to, let us open our hearts even wider to make up for it. May the festive season bring you and your family joy!

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Recipe: Simply Luscious – Sitaphal Kheer

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We would clamber up the sitaphal tree, pluck one right off the branches, and in our greedy delight not even check whether the fruit was ripe enough to eat before we tore it open with our hands and devoured the sweet white pulp. Then, we would spit out the shiny black seeds and collect them, for they were perfect for playing pallanguzhi, a traditional Tamil mancala game! Whenever I think of sitaphal, I think of these moments from my childhood. They were filled with joy, and I taste it again each time I taste the fruit.

 

Recently, I visited our organic farm a few hours’ drive from Chennai – and the sight of the abundant green harvest of the sitaphal trees brought back those childhood memories.

I will tell you more about our organic farm soon, where we grow paddy, varieties of gourd, numerous other vegetables, fruits – and a thoughtful selection of gorgeous native flowers that are fading from public memory. Hardly anyone wears or sells them anymore, but I take heart from the fact that there is one lady who sits by the Kapaleeshwarar Temple in Mylapore, with a colourful array of blossoms for purchase. Among them are the shenbagha and the manoranjitha. When I was a little girl, the teachers would wear beautiful manoranjitha flowers in their hair, and the classroom would be filled with their fragrance. And I would often think to myself: one day, when I am grown, I will have a house of my own with a tree that bears those flowers.

With the sweetness of all these memories in mind, and with the fruit in season in the serene landscape I dreamed of as a child, I remembered and craved a recipe that I had introduced into our family repertoire. When I got married and moved into my new home, I had enjoyed learning certain dishes from my mother-in-law that I found unusual. Among these was a fresh orange kheer. If you remember from this rose-coconut recipe, kheer is a kind of Indian pudding, with milk as the primary ingredient.

My mother-in-law’s citrusy dessert inspired my own variation. Perhaps I had wanted to bring the sitaphal I had plucked and gorged on in my childhood into my matrimonial home. And that’s how this sitaphal kheer was created. Even decades on, it remains a favourite of mine.

Sitaphal (Custard Apple) Kheer

(Yield – 8-10 cups)

Ingredients
1 ½ litres whole milk
2 large custard apples
1 ½ tablespoons corn flour or custard powder
½ cup sugar

You may know the sitaphal as the custard apple. I cannot recall seeing sitaphal sold abroad, which made me think it must be an indigenous Indian fruit, but it seems it’s actually native to the West Indies and Central America. Nonetheless, it thrives on our farm, and is popular throughout India. I wonder why it is not as well-known elsewhere as the mango. If you ask me, sitaphal is under-rated, and deserves renown.

One of the English names of sitaphal is sugar apple, attesting to its sweetness. Another is sweetsop. That tells you a lot about the taste of this fruit, if you haven’t had it. While it is not at all cloying, and in fact is quite subtle given its names, it is slightly higher in calories than other fruits too. Which means that I won’t sugar-coat it (pun intended): this recipe is a treat, and a bit of an indulgence! Still, sitaphal is also rich in potassium and magnesium, which protect the heart from disease, and Vitamin A and C. Fruit of any kind can never be truly bad for us, and sitaphal is no different.

Open up the soft, patterned green skin of this beautiful fruit, and begin to remove the seeds patiently using a spoon and clean hands. Keep the pulp in the refrigerator, covered.

In the meantime, boil the milk until it reduces partially. Vegans, you may want to try either coconut or almond milk. Keep stirring it on a low flame, making certain it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot.

Put the corn flour or custard powder into a small cup, and add 2-3 tablespoons of milk at room temperature. Stir this mixture well, until it is smooth. Now, gently add this mixture to the milk in the pot. You have to be careful now to stir continuously, so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom, which it is very likely to.

I like my kheer not too thick, but you may like yours thicker. In which case, simply add an additional 1 teaspoon of the corn flour or custard powder. Or reduce the quantity, to thin it further. Adjust according to the consistency of your preference.

Add the sugar. The taste of the sitaphal is so gentle and distinctive that I find the addition of cardamom, nuts or saffron – classic elements of most kheer recipes – takes away from this flavour. But you can always add these if you wish.

Once the milk thickens to the consistency you prefer (this will take approximately 15-20 minutes), turn off the flame and cover the pot with a lid. Allow this to cool, then refrigerate for a few hours.

Add the seeded sitaphal pulp into the refrigerated mixture and blend well. Serve this chilled dessert in small bowls.

Just as I substituted my mother-in-law’s fresh oranges for sitaphal, the lovely thing about this recipe is that you can use any fruit of your choice, based on your own tastes and seasonal availability. It is a luscious dessert, and it’s equally perfect for summers (when it has a cooling effect) and for the year-end festivities (when it’s also in season). I’d love to know what you think of it – and what variations you’ll spin up in your kitchen.

 

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Recipe: Sweet Simplicity: Jaggery-Whole Wheat Squares

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India contains a diverse mix of religions, both brought from abroad and homegrown. Among the latter category is Jainism, which has been practised for thousands of years. Some of my family members belong to this religion, and as the most sacred Jain festival, a time of fasting known as Paryushana, fell this year between August 19 and August 26, I was reminded of a particular temple we used to visit when we were kids… and a specific delicacy that was served there.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, food is ritually offered to gods in many Eastern religions. At the Mahudi or Madhupuri temple just outside Ahmedabad, the deity Ghantakarna Mahavir Dev loves a ghee-rich dessert known to Gujarati Jains as sukhudi. Gujarati Vaishnavites like myself know it as gol papdi, and offer it to the baby Lord Krishna. By whichever name you call it, it’s a very simple dish both in its preparation and in the ingredients used. It could have become a staple as a religious offering because of both reasons: any family would have been able to afford to make and serve it to God.

Jaggery is made of cane sugar or date palm. A sweetener that is believed to aid digestion, it is generally a healthier alternative to refined sugar. It has a cooling effect in the summer, and a warming effect in the winter. It’s a vital ingredient in Gujarati cuisine, and a pinch is used in so many dishes (even those which you wouldn’t classify as sweet) to add to the flavour. And it’s a sacred ingredient, of course – the gods certainly seem to enjoy it!

At this temple, this whole wheat and jaggery sweet is made in individual earthenware vessels. After it is offered to the deity, it is served piping hot to those who come to the temple. It is absolutely forbidden to either waste even a little or to take it outside of the temple compound. If you know you’ll be unable to finish your portion, you must give it to pilgrims rather than throw it away. And it is considered extremely bad luck to take sukhudi out of the temple – a theory which my grandmother once tested to her great surprise!

The story was recounted to me by my aunt Sam, whom I visited a couple of weeks ago. Many years ago, when Sam was still a teenager, some of the family had gone to Mahudi. When they returned, the parents and elders were chatting downstairs, while the kids played on the third floor. Sam had been sitting atop of a pile of mattresses that had been set by a window. Down below, her mother (my grandmother) was telling the others that she didn’t believe in the superstition about taking sukhudi out of the temple. Just as she firmly insisted, “Sam just brought some back for me, and nothing happened – I do not believe in such tales!” – a loud thud was heard.

Sam had fallen out of the window! Miraculously, for a fall from the third floor, she was absolutely unscathed. Her mother winced and bit back her words, and made a promise to offer sukhudi at the Mahudi temple as an appeasement. The incident ended any further attempt in my family to take sukhudi out of the Mahudi temple. Perhaps it was a coincidence, and perhaps all our beliefs are created with our own minds (I am reading Yuval Noah Harari’s amazing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and it’s making me ponder such ideas deeply). Still, none of us has tempted fate since.

Whether you want to see these whole wheat jaggery squares as a religious offering or a treat for your sweet tooth is up to you. One thing is for certain: I hope they taste utterly divine.

Jaggery & Whole Wheat Squares

Yield: 10-15 pieces
Prep time: 20 minutes

1 cup whole wheat flour
½ cup clarified butter (ghee)
¾ cup jaggery
½ teaspoon ginger powder
2 tablespoons slivered almonds

Call them whole wheat jaggery squares, call them sukhudi or call them gol papdi – these sweets are very easy to make once you have the ingredients on hand.

Grease a steel plate with some ghee and keep it aside. In a kadhai, or a wok-shaped pan, add ghee and allow it to melt. In a few seconds, add the whole wheat flour. With a spatula, stir and sauté until the mixture turns golden brown. This will take approximately 10-15 minutes on a medium to low flame. Remove from the stove and add the jaggery and ginger powder. As always, season to your taste – I even add cardamom, desiccated coconut, cinnamon or masala chai powder when I make this dish. Ginger in particular is something that is traditionally added during winters for its warming effect.

A word about jaggery: it varies in sweetness around the world, so you must gauge the correct amount to use when you make this dish. I had used a particularly sweet batch when I made this after talking to my aunt, and found it too cloying, then made it again to my taste. However, if you add too little jaggery, the mixture will not bind. As with any recipe, sometimes it takes more than one try to get it right.

Mix well until the jaggery melts and the ginger powder or flavours of your choice are distributed evenly. While still hot, pour the mixture onto the greased plate and spread evenly. Flatten it with a cup so it evens out, and add the almond slivers on top quickly, before it begins to cool.

Then, cut into even squares and allow them to cool before transferring them to an air tight container.

These whole wheat and jaggery squares are so simple to make – all you really have to do is stir it well for it to cook properly. That’s probably why they were such a staple in my childhood, something my mom could whip up quickly and store for several days’ worth of after-school snacks. As they don’t spoil easily, gol papdi was also something we took with us when we travelled. Memories, love and a sense of security – they are contained in every bite of a cherished dish, aren’t they?

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