Kalakand at Home!

Hi to all!

It feels so nice to be back writing a post after a long time. Thus, thought of sharing a recipe of a sweet dish, one of my favorites, Kalakand. Now, why did I choose this sweet?

Well, it so happened that a few days ago, the milk went sour while I put it for boil. So immediately I removed it from the stove and added some lemon juice and allowed further coagulation. After a minute, I filtered the water out and mashed the solid filtrate, which is called as the home-made paneer (HMP). And then decided to prepare Kalakand with it. And that is how it all started.

Before writing this post, I thought of learning the origin of this delicious sweet-meat. It always feels good to know something more about the dish you are eating besides enjoying its taste!

Origin


Kalakand is originally from Braj in Uttar Pradesh. In Urdu, it is actually called Qalaqand. "Qand" in Arabic means Sweet. It is a very popular sweet in Northern and Eastern India.



Following is the method to prepare this very easy dish at home.

Ingredients

a) Home-made paneer, HMP (explained above) - prepared from 1 liter milk
b) saffron strands
c) Milk - 1/2 liter
d) Sugar
e) Ghee or home-made cream
f) Elaichi or Cardamom
g) Badam or Almonds (cut them into long thin pieces)
h) Pista or Pistachio (cut them into long thin pieces)

Method

a) Add saffron strands to the HMP and keep it separately.
b) In a thick-bottomed pan, add ghee or cream, milk. Add sugar in equal proportion to milk or according to your taste. Generally, kalakand need not be too sweet.
c) Allow the above to boil on low flame till the milk comes together.
d) Once, the milk volume reduces to half, add the saffronised HMP to it and allow it to boil further.
e) Once the mixture is thickened enough, add powdered elaichi to it.
f) Take a smaller circumference plate with high sides. Grease it a little and then pour the mixture in it.
(Small circumference ensures the kalakand to get its height as compared to larger plate that will spread the mixture more, hence, leading to thin pieces

g) After spreading the mixture, sprinkle the pieces of badam and pista over the mixture and allow it to cool down.
h) Once the mixture cools down, cut small cubical pieces and our sweet dish is ready.

Alternatively use condensed milk

Above in the method section, points (b and c) is actually the preparation of condensed milk. If you have a can of condensed milk already, you can directly add the HMP and the condensed milk according to the sweetness you want and then add powdered elaichi.

Condensed milk reduces your preparation time. Anyway, since I did not have condensed milk, I prepared it first.

Either way, the end product is really delicious!

Those readers who tried it at home, please share your experience!! :)

Have a sweet weekend!! :)