Chhena Jalebi

The curds are rolled into pretzel shapes and deep-fried, not piped as a batter.

Vegetarian, but not vegan — contains dairy (chhena), dairy (ghee), dairy (whole milk).

Ingredients

• 500 g Chhena, as on its own page, well kneaded
• 3 tablespoons plain flour
• 600 g sugar
• 500 ml water
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
• oil or ghee for deep frying

Method

1. THE CURDS ARE ROLLED INTO PRETZEL SHAPES AND DEEP-FRIED, NOT PIPED AS A BATTER. This is the one thing to understand about the dish, because its name points somewhere misleading. An ordinary jalebi is a thin fermented batter squeezed in spirals straight into hot oil. This is not that: its article says fresh chhena is thoroughly kneaded and ROLLED UP into shapes similar to pretzels before being deep fried. So you are handling a dough, rolling ropes between your palms and looping them, and the result is dense and chewy where a batter jalebi is hollow and brittle.
2. THE ROPES ARE ROLLED THIN AND EVEN. A finger's thickness, twenty centimetres long, then looped into a figure of eight and the ends pressed on. Thick ropes stay raw in the middle; uneven ones burn where they are thin.
3. A LITTLE FLOUR HOLDS THE ROPE TOGETHER. Three tablespoons kneaded in. Pure chhena cracks as you roll it out long.
4. THE OIL IS MODERATE AND THE FRYING IS SLOW. 150C, five to six minutes, turning, until deep gold. Hot oil seals the outside and the centre stays wet curd -- and this is a thicker piece than a batter jalebi, so it needs the time.
5. THEY GO FROM THE FRYER STRAIGHT INTO WARM SYRUP. Not cold syrup and not cold fritters: a hot piece in warm syrup draws it in. Leave them twenty minutes, turning once.
6. THE SYRUP IS A ONE-THREAD SYRUP, THICKER THAN A RASGULLA'S. Six hundred grams of sugar to five hundred millilitres of water, boiled five minutes. These are fried and sealed, so they do not absorb the way a simmered ball does, and a thin syrup would simply run off them.
7. CARDAMOM GOES IN THE SYRUP, OFF THE HEAT. Half a teaspoon once the pan is off the flame.
8. THEY ARE SERVED HOT OR COLD AND BOTH ARE RIGHT. Its article says either, and they are different things: hot the outside is still crisp, cold it has gone uniformly chewy.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under India · All recipes