This month, March’19 Food Of Interest completes 3 full years. I did post the 1st post on March 4th 2016 but I would like to think March and April 2016 were the founding months of FOI. It laid the foundations, setting up the website, finding a nice format for the posts, easy to read and make recipes, indeed it is a special month! With over 15K users per month I thank my readers for trying my recipes 🙂 So here it is and to make it even more statistically special, the 400th post on FOI, on a sweet note with “Basundi“.
Creamy milk sweets are too good to ignore. Imagine thickened sweetened creamy milk loaded with pistachios, almonds, cashews, with subtle fragrance of elaichi. Makes you go into a different world, a world filled with creaminess of milk and nuttiness of rich nuts! This rich introduction is for a traditional Maharashtra and Karnataka special sweet dish, “Basundi”.
Basundi and Rabri are very similar in taste and texture but I feel rabri is thicker and sweeter. Both taste heavenly, the nectar of the Gods! After this wonderful extended introduction to today’s dish let me reveal basundi needs time and effort. As they say, “sabr ka phal meetha hota hai” (patience reaps rewards) and the reward here is a creamy basundi which you can savour!
Try more sweet recipes from FOI:
Kalakand
Kaju Katli
Seviyaan Kheer
Shahi Tukda
Badam Kheer
Carrot Halwa
- 1¾ litre full cream milk
- ¼ Cup sugar
- 1 pinch saffron
- 5-6 cardamom
- 6-7 each of cashews, almonds and pistachios
- Few dried rose petals (optional)
- In a thick bottomed non-stick pan, apply some ghee
- Boil milk
- Reduce to half quantity
- Chop the nuts
- Tip in the nuts into the boiled milk
- Add sugar and mix well till sugar melts
- Let the milk reduce further
- Add little saffron and elaichi powder
- Mix very well
- Let it reduce and thicken
- Lastly add a few dried rose petals
- Let the flavours infuse
- Chill before serving, it took about 1½ hours to make
Use any nuts of your choice, only cashews only almonds etc
Do not discard the cream, push it to the sides and mix with the milk, all the goodness is required to make this sweet
Basundi Stepwise:
In a thick bottomed non-stick pan, apply some ghee
Boil milk on low flame
Reduce to half quantity
Chop the nuts
Tip in the nuts into the boiled milk
Add sugar and mix well till sugar melts
Let the milk reduce further
Add little saffron and elaichi powder
Mix very well
Let it reduce and thicken
Lastly add a few dried rose petals
Let the flavours infuse
Chill before serving, it took about 1 1/2 hours to make
