Punjabi & North Indian · Dessert
Phirni
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, a floral thread lifting the aroma, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 60 g basmati rice, soaked 30 minutes then drained
- 1 litre full fat milk
- 100 g sugar
- 6 green cardamom pods, seeds ground
- 0.2 g saffron, bloomed in 1 tbsp warm milk
- 5 ml kewra water
- 20 g pistachios, slivered
- 15 g blanched almonds, slivered
The skills inside
The words inside
Toasting: Nuts, Seeds, Grains & Coconut
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
- Drain the rice and pound or pulse it to the feel of fine sand: pinch some between the fingers and you should still make out separate grains, not flour.
- Reduce the milk over medium heat for 20 minutes, scraping the skin off the sides back in, until it has lost a quarter of its volume and faintly coats the spoon. 20 min
- Slacken the ground rice with 100 ml of the hot milk, rain it in while whisking, and cook on low for 18 minutes, dragging a spoon across the base without pause, until the grains are soft and a spoon drawn through leaves a clean line. 18 min
- Only now stir in the sugar, then take the pan off the heat and add the cardamom, saffron milk and kewra water.
- Pour it hot into shallow earthenware bowls, scatter the nuts over, and chill at least 4 hours until the top sets firm enough to hold a spoon mark. 240 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
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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