Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Rosh Bora




I wanted to post some recipes of pithe or homemade sweets on the day of Sankranti itself, but somehow I couldn't make the time. I cooked a wholesome fare of an assortment of pithes - Rosh bora, Kheer Patishapta and Dudh Puli Pithe yesterday. So busy was I cooking and distributing them among peers that by the time I hit the sack, it was past midnight. Usually, I am a night owl having huge capacity to remain awake late into the night but I was so worn out, I fast fell asleep. Anyway, better late than never. So here I will be posting some recipes back to back. First one is Rosh Bora.
'Rosh' meaning syrup in Bengali and 'bora' meaning fritters, the two combined give hints of an ultimate homemade sweet in the making. Some people use few strands of saffron to enrich the flavor of the syrup which I gave a deliberate miss. I don't like the 'shahi' smell with traditional Bengali sweets; I am pretty conservative in that way. 






Ingredients:                                               Cooking time: 40 minutes
ü  2 cups of Biulir Daal or whole white urad dal
ü  1 tbsp fennel seeds
ü  1/2 tsp salt
ü  1/2 tsp black pepper
ü  White oil for frying
ü  Notun gur or date jaggery, according to your craving
ü  Sugar syrup
Method:
1) Soak biulir dal or whole urad dal for an hour. Drain the water and grind into fine paste.
2) Mix in fennel seeds, salt and black pepper with the lentil paste. (The consistency of the mixture should be thick.)
3) Heat oil in a wok and when oil comes to smoking point, drop a tablespoon of the lentil batter and fry till golden brown in color. Fry in batches.
4) Lentil boras are ready. Take them on to an oil absorbent paper.
5) Now while frying the boras in batches, get your sugar syrup ready. (You may use the sugar syrup that comes with readymade rosogollas or other syrup based sweets or you may prepare the sugar syrup from scratch at home. In case of doing the latter, heat 1 cup water with 1 cup sugar. When sugar completely dissolves and forms 1 string consistency, turn the heat off.)
6) I had a carton full of sugar syrup of rosogollas resting in the refrigerator that I was looking for some opportunity to make use of. So I heated that sugar syrup (about 2 cups), added 1/4 cup of water and dropped 3-4 chunks of date jaggery. When jaggery completely dissolved, it lent a beautiful color and flavor to the syrup.
7) Soak the boras in sugar syrup for an hour at least before serving. Boras will turn super moist after absorbing the syrup.

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