Middle Eastern · Dessert
Muhallabia
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with a floral thread lifting the aroma, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 1 litre whole milk
- 70 g cornflour
- 20 g ground rice
- 120 g caster sugar
- 3 small mastic tears, about 0.5 g
- 15 ml rose water
- 60 g pistachios, chopped
Equipment
Mortar & pestle
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilMashing & puréeing
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · nuts
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Freeze the mastic tears for 15 minutes, then grind them cold in a mortar with 10 g of the sugar, which stops the resin smearing and gumming into a ball. 15 min
- Whisk the cornflour and ground rice into 200 ml of the cold milk until not one lump is left.
- Bring the remaining milk and sugar to a bare simmer, pour in the slurry while whisking hard, and cook, stirring constantly, until it coats the back of a spoon and one or two slow bubbles heave to the surface, about 6 minutes. 6 min
- Take it off the heat, stir in the mastic sugar and the rose water, and pour into bowls at once while it still flows.
- Chill 3 hours, then scatter with the pistachios. 180 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
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- Belgian tripel
- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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