Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Watermelon Burfi

This is an Indian sweet that I've made for over 30 years. A few years back I saw them decorated as watermelon slices and have since adapted that design in my own way. Feel free to color and shape the burfi from this recipe into any design. The recipe given here makes about 60 mini watermelon slice burfi pieces.
Ingredients:
  • 15 oz part skim ricotta cheese
  • 1 stick of butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3/4 cup dry milk
  • 1/2 tsp grinded cardamon seeds
  • whole cardamon seeds
  • green food coloring
  • red food coloring
Directions:
Place two paper towels on a dish and empty the ricotta cheese on top of them. This will help absorb the extra water. While waiting, blend the dry milk in a blender to break up the larger chunks of and create a finer powder. 
Put the ricotta cheese in a nonstick pot on the stove top. Add 1 stick of butter to the pot. Turn on the stove to med heat and stir the ingredients to break up the butter. Continue stirring for about 10 minutes. 
Ricotta cheese and butter being stirred.

Then add 1 cup of sugar to the pot. Continue to stir for about 7 more minutes. Be careful of splashing at this stage. Constantly stirring will avoid burning or drying out the bottom portion in the pot. Next add 1.2 tsp of grinded cardamon seeds. Continue stirring for about another 3 minutes. You'll note that the ingredients should be thickening at this point. Add 3/4 cup dry milk to the pot and stir for another 4 minutes. Then reduce the heat to med-low. The ingredients should be forming a batter. 
Forming the batter.
Turn the heat off and divide the batter in half. Transfer the second half into another nonstick pot. Add roughly 4 drops of red color to one half and stir it in. Do the same with green color in the other half.
Remove the batters from the pots.
Red and green batters ready to be shaped.
Lightly lather your hands in butter to prevent sticking when working with the batter. Roll spheres of the red batter that are about 1.5 inches in diameter. This recipe should make roughly 15 balls. Spread out the balls on a dish and place them in the freezer for 10 minutes.
Red spheres ready to be frozen for 10 mins.
Divide the green batter into an equal number of pieces (roughly 15). Once again, lather your hands in butter to prevent sticking. With each piece, create a flat disk that will be wrapped around the cool red spheres and cover them evenly and completely. Place the spheres in the fridge for at least 2 hours to harden. 
Cover the red spheres with our green disks.
Spheres after being refrigerated for a few hours.

Cut the spheres into quarters to create 4 slices per sphere. Then decorate each piece with the cardamon seeds to make them look like mini watermelon slices. Enjoy!
Finished!

1 comment:

  1. This is so creative, I was looking for it quite long time.
    Thanks a lot I will be trying this for ganpati festival...

    ReplyDelete