Indian · Dessert

Rasmalai

Advanced
60 min
roughly 4 of 4 for cost
Vegetarian

silky · bright · warm-spiced · floral Leads with a silken, spoon-slow texture, acid holding everything up to the light, leaving a faint perfume.

Ingredients

2 litres whole milk, for the chhena
60 ml lemon juice, mixed with 60 ml water
1.2 litres whole milk, for the reduced milk
1 litre water
200 g caster sugar, for the poaching syrup
70 g caster sugar, for the milk
0.3 g saffron threads
4 green cardamom pods, cracked
30 g pistachios, slivered

Equipment

Fine sieve

The skills inside

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil Salted water & the float test Straining & passing through a sieve

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

Start this the day before: the discs need at least 4 hours in the milk. Bring the 2 litres of milk to a boil, pull it off the heat, wait a minute, then add the diluted lemon juice a spoonful at a time, stirring slowly, and stop the instant the whey runs clear yellow-green and the curd draws away in soft clouds. 240 min
Strain through muslin, run cold water over the curd for 30 seconds to wash the acid out, then hang it for 30 minutes: chhena left too wet dissolves in the pot, too dry and the discs crack open. 30 min
Knead the chhena on the worktop with the heel of your hand for 6 minutes to 8 minutes, until the grain has gone and a smear on your palm feels smooth and slightly greasy. Divide into 12, roll, and press into 1 cm discs with no cracks at the edge. 6 min
Boil the 200 g sugar with the 1 litre of water in a wide pan of at least 26 cm, slide the discs in, cover, and keep it at a hard rolling boil for 12 minutes; they must swim freely and roughly double. 12 min
Meanwhile reduce the 1.2 litres of milk with the cardamom by a third, sweeten with the 70 g sugar and add the saffron. Squeeze each disc gently to shed its syrup, settle them into the warm milk, and chill at least 4 hours. Scatter with pistachios. 240 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.

Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes

Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.

Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.

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: Moscato d’Asti
Also Right: Late-harvest Riesling
From the Taps: Witbier
Zero-Proof: Sparkling elderflower

Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.

Family notes

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Rasmalai Search YouTube: Ranveer Brar on Rasmalai A YouTube search for Ranveer Brar and this dish. No affiliation.