Rasgulla

The second sweet recipe for this weeks marathon is rasgulla - the spongy white balls famous from our very own Kolkatta. Of course this one is also favourite with my mother.

The dessert is known as Rosogolla or Roshogolla in Bengali and Rasagola in Odia. Rasgulla is derived from the words ras ("juice") and gulla ("ball").Other names for the dish include Roshgulla (Sylheti), Rasagulla, Rossogolla, Roshogolla, Rasagola, Rasagolla, and Rasbhari or Rasbari (source: wikipedia)

The spongy white rasgulla is believed to have been introduced in present-day West Bengal in 1868 by a Kolkata-based confectioner named Nobin Chandra Das. Das started making rasgulla by processing the mixture of chhena and semolina in boiling sugar syrup in contrast to the mixture sans semolina in the original rasgulla in his sweet shop located at Sutanuti (present-day Baghbazar). His descendants claim that his recipe was an original, but according to another theory, he modified the traditional Odisha rasgulla recipe to produce this less perishable variant.

I am not a big fan of rasgullas but everyone at home likes it. I just read some blogs and tried it out. The result was awesome… 

Ingredients

Milk (full cream) - 1 Litre

Lemon juice - 2 tbsp

Sugar - 2 cups

Water - 3 &1/2 cups

Elachi powder- 1 pinch

Ice cubes - 12 

Nuts (optional) - For garnish

Method:

• Heat the milk,when it start to boil,simmer the flame, add the lemon juice slowly as you stir.
• Switch off the flame once the whey water clearly separates.
• Add  the Ice cubes and mix well. 
• Take a metal strainer,lined with a cheese cloth/muslin cloth (I used my dupatta). Pour the curdled milk in it.
• Wash it well in the running water under the tap to remove the lemon smell and sourness.
• Let the water drain and hang this chenna for 30 minutes.  I just slightly squeezed the excess water.
• After 1/2 hour,take out the chenna in a bowl.I will be now more like a crumble look wise.
• Now knead this for 7-10 minutes gently to make it like a soft and smooth dough.
• Make smooth equal sized small balls. I made some 20 balls.
• Take sugar,cardamom powder and water in a pressure cooker and boil it.
• After the sugar gets dissolved completely and the syrup boils, add the balls made carefully one by one.
• Cover the pressure cooker and cook it till you get one whistle in medium flame. After a whistle, keep for another 5 minutes in low flame.
• Put off the flame and let the pressure gets released by itself,then open the lid to see the rasgullas – by now it would have doubled in size. If you think the sugar syrup is too thin and not sweet enough, boil again in low flame until you get desired thickness of the syrup.

Note: 

• ice cubes are added to stop the curdling at that instant. It prevents the chenna to become hard and helps for soft texture.
• The kneading part is very important,knead smooth and soft with patience.
• Do not squeeze the water manually forcefully, you can do little gently but not more.
• Do not cook in high flame in pressure cooker. It will break the rasgullas.

Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing this BM#76