(upbeat music)
- Hi, guys, I'm Kamana.
You can find me on Instagram @kamanabhaskaran,
and I share South Asian-inspired tips,
recipes, and hacks to make life easier.
Some people think Indian cooking can be complicated,
and I can understand why.
When you see the recipe list, it's usually this long.
That's why today I'm gonna be making
three five-ingredient Indian desserts.
So let's get started.
So the first recipe I'm going to be showing you today
is mango kulfi.
Mango kulfi is a traditional Indian ice cream,
and what makes it different than American ice cream
is that it's made without air,
so it has a richer, creamier, denser taste.
To get started, we're gonna bloom our saffron.
Saffron is one of my favorite ingredients,
because it's found in a lot of traditional Indian cooking,
and it's also a really powerful antioxidant.
So I'm gonna put in about a pinch...
and that's about 10 to 15 strands...
and add in about a tablespoon of hot water.
So adding a tablespoon of hot water to your pinch of saffron
really helps extract that flavor from the saffron
and saffron can be a little pricey,
so this gives you a little bit more bang for your buck.
I'm gonna set this aside for about five minutes,
just to let the flavors really get extracted.
Now that my saffron is off to the side,
I'm going to show you how I crush fresh cardamom.
And all I do is I take the cardamom out of the pod,
remove the shell,
and just make sure that you get all of the black seeds out,
put them into your mortar and pestle,
and then you just give it a nice pound.
(pestle pounding)
That looks great.
I'm gonna set that aside,
and I'll get started on our whipped cream.
So now I'm gonna add my heavy cream.
So this has been chilled a bit,
and I'm adding it to the bowl,
and I'm gonna whip it until I get a nice, soft peaks.
(mixer whirring)
Now I'm ready to add the rest of my ingredients.
So the first thing is half a can
of sweetened condensed milk.
You want to just gently fold that in
to the heavy whipping cream.
Now I'm adding my mango caser.
So this is canned mango pulp I get from the Indian store.
You can use fresh Alphonso mango if you can find it,
but if you use canned mango pulp,
that's completely fine too.
And now you'll see it turn that beautiful orange color
that's signature to mango kulfi.
Add in my ground cardamom and my saffron with the water.
Give that a gentle, nice mix.
Once you get this mixed and nice and incorporated,
we're going to add it to our bowl.
It looks so beautiful.
Love that color.
That's exactly the color that we're looking for.
I'm gonna cover this and pop it in the freezer,
and let this freeze for about eight hours or overnight.
So this is what the kulfi should look like
coming out of the freezer.
It's gotten nice and hard,
but it'll still have that signature creamy texture.
Now we're ready to dig in and scoop it out.
And I love seeing the saffron and the cardamom,
and look at that rich, orange, mango color.
And now I'm just gonna sprinkle it
with a little bit of rose pedal, a little bit of saffron,
just to give it a little pretty look.
There we go, mango kulfi.
I cannot wait to try this.
Mmm.
That mango just brings back so many memories
of summers in India.
The mango just shines in this recipe.
It goes so well with the saffron and the cardamom.
Honestly, I think this is the best batch of kulfi
I've ever made.
So next, we'll be making coconut ladoos.
Coconut ladoos are like a little ball of joy.
We have these for Ugadi, the Indian New Year,
Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations,
and I also use coconut ladoos.
Instead of holiday cookies,
I give these to my friends during Christmas,
and they love them because they're just so different
and they taste so good.
So the first step that we're gonna do
is we're gonna add desiccated coconut.
Desiccated coconut is coconut that has the air
and the moisture has been taken out of the coconut,
and all that remains is this fine powder.
If you don't have desiccated coconut,
you can just take dried coconut flakes,
put them in the food processor,
and you get this nice desiccated coconut powder.
I'm using the Instapot right now.
You can use your stove as well.
But what we're going to do is we're going to add this
to a little bit of low heat to get these nice and toasty.
The only thing you really have to remember
when you are putting in your coconut
is you just have to keep stirring
'cause you don't want any part of it to burn.
Dude, you can almost feel
that it's become a little bit crispier
and just turns a tiny bit of light brown.
Now we're gonna add our sweetened condensed milk.
And we just put it right in, mix it right in.
Remember to turn your heat off,
and you just mix this together.
Now, what I love is you don't have to be too gentle.
You really have to use the muscle
to just get it all mixed in.
And you can already see a dough forming.
And now you're gonna add your cardamom.
It really just elevates this dough, wakes it up.
This recipe, you don't have to be too gentle.
You don't have to worry about messing up,
and so there's really nothing that can go wrong here,
which is why I love it.
It's kind of like my fail-proof dessert.
And see?
Now, this is how the dough should look.
The only thing is is that the dough right now,
it's a little too soft.
So I'm gonna put this in the fridge
for about five minutes, just so it gets hardened,
and it's easier to work with.
This is the dough out of the fridge,
and you can see that it has hardened a lot.
And now, we're going to do my favorite part,
which is making our ladoo balls.
So I take about a golf-ball size,
and I just roll it in my hands.
I can feel it sticking just a bit,
So what I'm going to do is show you guys a little hack.
I put a little bit of ghee
or a little bit of coconut oil on my hands,
and that way, the dough doesn't stick to my hands.
I take this ball here.
You don't have to make it perfect.
You just want to get it into a nice little round ball.
And then this is what I like to do.
I roll it in a bit of shredded coconut,
just to give it a nice, beautiful little texture here.
And there you go.
These are my ladoos.
You can kind of stack them and plate them how you like.
You can see they have this beautiful round shape.
But what I'm going to do is
I'm going to put them in the fridge
for another three to five minutes,
just so they harden up and they really hold that shape,
and I'm gonna check back in.
And what I like to do is at the very end,
I take a little bit of fresh pistachio,
and I just sprinkle it all over the top.
And there you go.
Coconut ladoos with five ingredients.
Oh my gosh, this is so good.
And what I love
is that these really have that authentic Indian taste.
People will think you spent hours making these,
but they were so easy to make.
This last recipe we're gonna be making
is saffron Shrikhand mousse.
Shrikhand is a dish found in the western states of India.
It's typically served at weddings,
or you can even use Shrikhand as a side dish
because it really compliments spicy Indian food,
where you want a little bit of yogurt to cool it down.
So first thing, you have to remember to hang your yogurt.
What you do is you take a strainer
and you put it over a bowl.
This bowl is gonna collect the excess liquid, or the whey,
from your yogurt, and then you take a cheesecloth
or a piece of muslin cloth and put it over your strainer,
just like this.
And now you're gonna add your yogurt.
I'm gonna put that right into the cheesecloth.
Next, we're going to wrap this up.
And what you want to do is just create a little ball
and just give it a nice little twist.
I can already see some of the liquid or that whey
is kind of coming out, and that's exactly what we want.
I'm just gonna let this sit in the fridge
for about six to eight hours.
I like to do it overnight.
That way, I know all of that whey has separated
from the yogurt.
This is what the yogurt looks like
after you've kept it in the fridge overnight,
and you can see that kind of liquid, that whey,
has drained out from the yogurt.
You can keep the whey if you want to.
I know some people use this in their smoothies.
I personally just discard it, but do whatever you like.
I just love to see this part, how it looks.
Oh, that looks so beautiful.
Look at that.
It's a lot thicker, a lot harder.
It almost looks like a dough.
So I have my whole curd, and I put it right into my bowl.
Now I'm going to add one cup of powdered sugar.
I've got my soaked saffron,
just like I did in my kulfi recipe,
we're going to add it right to the mixture with the water.
And the last thing is
we're gonna add in our ground cardamom,
and we're just gonna mix these together.
But you really do have to use a little bit of muscle
because yogurt is kind of stiff.
Perfect. That's exactly how I want it to look.
At this point, it's pretty much done.
You can see it has this really velvety, nice creamy texture.
Give it a little taste.
Mmm, perfect.
And now all you have to do is transfer it
to your serving dishes.
So what I like to do is I like to top
with a little whipped cream and crushed nuts at the end.
This is optional, but my nani always told me...
my grandma always told me
the best part about making Indian desserts
is to make them your own.
Sprinkle, sprinkle with just a little bit of crushed nuts.
And there you go, five-ingredient saffron Shrikhand mousse.
Mmm.
This tastes so silky.
You can taste the cardamom, that saffron.
It really just married so well together.
This tastes like the perfect Sunday afternoon dessert.
And there you go, three five-ingredient Indian desserts.
First we made our mango kulfi, then our coconut ladoos,
and finally, our saffron Shrikhand mousse.
I cannot wait for you guys to try this
and let me know what your favorite is
in the comments below.
Okay.
- [Man] Oh, yes!
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