Smitten by a sweet cloud

Pavlova is a dessert with myriad textures and tastes - crunchy, brittle, sweet, and soft. Photos: Sriram Narayanan

One of my most awe-inspiring moments in the kitchen is to watch an egg white billow up into an airy, creamy cloud a few minutes after it meets a balloon whisk. Once you have created this well-whipped cloud, the possibilities for what happens next are endless. 

Carefully fold the whites into melted chocolate for a silky chocolate mousse, or fold them with a finely sieved powder of blanched almonds and sugar for a lovely French macaron mixture, ready for the oven. Combined the whipped whites with grated cheese (Gruyere or Comte), and seasoning, fill into individual ramekins, and slide into the oven for around 15 minutes for a posh cheese soufflé that rises to the occasion. If all this is too much work, just fold in whipped egg whites separately into your regular pound cake batter for the lightest bite of cake. 

That is the magic of whipped egg whites.

My favourite way with them though, is to showcase the whipped whites just the way they are (with that light, airy texture) into a classic baked meringue. All you need to do is add fine sugar, slowly, during the whisking process and you have shiny meringue that is ready to be baked in the oven.  

This week, with Christmas just around the corner, I wanted to bake a special meringue. So I picked the Pavlova, which is a special Christmas and summertime treat for scores of families in New Zealand and Australia, and is the national dish of both the countries. This is a baked meringue with a crisp crust and soft inside and is typically topped with whipped cream and fresh fruit. 

Fresh mulberries and ruby red pomegranate seeds make for a lovely topping on this Pavlova

A chef in Wellington, New Zealand, is believed to have created the dish in honour of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova when she toured the country in the 1920s. But Australia stakes claim to the Pavlova’s creation too.

In either case, we have a lovely dessert that all arguing parties can dig into. 

Pavlova

Adapted from a recipe by Donna Hay

Ingredients

4 egg whites

1 cup superfine sugar

2 tablespoons cornflour

2 teaspoons vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar)

A pinch of salt

100 ml fresh cream

200 gm mulberries

Seeds from half a pomegranate

(You can use any berries you like, or sliced peaches, plums or kiwifruit)

Method

Preheat the oven to 150 degree Celsius. 

Separate 4 eggs and place the egg whites in a large, clean bowl. Add a pinch of salt. Start whisking the eggs with an electric balloon whisk, or with a whisk in a stand-in mixer on a low speed.

Add the vinegar while whisking the whites. When the eggs become frothy and start growing in volume, start adding the sugar, a teaspoon at a time.

The meringue mixture will start looking shiny now. Add the cornflour.

Continue whisking until stiff peaks form. 

Lay a sheet of parchment paper on a baking tray. Heap the meringue mixture onto the tray with a spatula or a flat spoon. 

Bake at 120 degree Celsius or 100 degree Celsius (fan) for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Let cool inside oven before getting the meringue out, and do not open oven door while baking. Whip the fresh cream with some fine sugar, drizzle over cooled meringue. Decorate top with fresh fruit.

Tips: 

1. Separate the eggs carefully; no bits of yolk should stray into the whites. 

2. The bowl in which you whip the whites and the whisk must be squeaky clean, with no oily residue whatsoever. If any grease gets into the whites, they won’t grow in volume.

3. I rub the inside of the bowl with lime juice or a little vinegar to ensure no grease stays in. 

It's a half-moon day

Crisp and flaky kanavlas with a sweet coconut, dry fruit and nut filling. Photos: Sai Raje

A few days ago, I was watching a food show on television, which had its host chomping on some sweet pastries in Mexico. The pastries caught my eye because they looked remarkably similar to the festive, half-moon shaped karanjis or kanavlas made at home during Diwali. My family’s homemade kanavla usually has a sweet coconut, dryfruit and nut filling. We also enjoy a finger-licking, savoury version that is filled with spiced, mutton kheema. 

The Mexican half-moon pastry described earlier, is called the empanada, and is both sweet and savoury as well. It is made by employing an almost identical process as the kanavla. Roll out specially made pastry dough into circles, add the filling, roll over the pastry and seal the filling inside, and finally, bake or fry the pastries. When made well, the pastry outside is crisp, light and quite flaky, which goes well with a flavoursome filling, both sweet and savoury.

The food geek in me was curious to find out if there were versions of this half-moon pastry in other cultures. So I consulted my dependable Larousse Gastronomique, and found several forms of this delectable treat. 

The Cornish pasty from Cornwall, Britain is probably the most popular of its kind. It’s a large baked pastry encasing a seasoned beef, potato and onion filling.

In Southern Italy, especially Sicily, this pastry takes the form of an Easter special called cassatedde, and is filled with sweet ricotta cheese, lemon or orange zest, and candied fruit and nuts. Israel has a savoury version called the boureka that is filled with cheese and potatoes. 

While the half-moon pastry is fashioned in a similar manner by several cultures, the method of making the pastry dough itself differs greatly. While some half-moon recipes call for buttery shortcrust pastry, others depend on yeasted dough. With Marathi kanavlas, making dough with gritty semolina is key. Fine flour just won’t do. Layering the dough with butter is also necessary to make a kanavla with a crisp, flaky exterior, much like puff pastry.

For my first effort, I enlisted the help of my mother, who not only provided me with the family recipe, but demonstrated it step by step too. 

Kanavla 

Pronounced ka-nuv-laa

Makes 10 

Ingredients

Pastry dough:

100 gm fine semolina or rava 

Pinch of crushed saffron

50 gm ghee

Cornflour

Filling:

100 gm desiccated dry coconut

100 gm superfine sugar

5-6 cardamom pods, crushed

Large pinch nutmeg

2 tablespoons whole-wheat flour

1 teaspoon ghee

Method

1. Add a pinch of salt, crushed saffron to the semolina. Mix in a little water, a few drops at a time and lightly mix semolina into stiff dough. Cover and set aside for 3 hours.

2. Sauté the coconut in a pan on low heat for 3 to 4 minutes, blitz in a mixer-grinder until fine, and set aside. Sauté the whole-wheat flour with a teaspoon of ghee on a low heat for 3 to 4 minutes. Mix the coconut, flour, sugar, crushed cardamom, nutmeg and set the filling aside.

3. Lightly beat 50 gm of ghee in a bowl until pale and smooth. Add cornflour, bit by bit, until the mixture resembles soft, white butter. 

4. Blitz semolina dough in a mixer-grinder for a minute or two, until soft and stretchy. Divide dough into three parts.

5. Roll out each of the three parts into thin discs. 

6. Spread the ghee-cornflour paste onto a disc; layer all discs in this manner.

7. Crimp up the sides, and roll into a cylindrical shape.

8. Cut lengthwise, and cut into 2-inch wide pieces. You will now notice several layers of buttered dough in each of the pieces.

9. Take a piece and roll out into a disc very gently with a rolling pin. Heap 2 teaspoons of the filling to the disc's centre.

10. Cover over and seal the edges.

11. Keep all the kanavlas covered under a clean, damp cloth. 

Deep fry the pastries in ghee on low heat, and eat a couple of them when warm!

A traditional treat, revisited with a new technique

Ninava (pronounced nee-nah-vuh), is a dense cake, made with that classic combination of coconut milk and jaggery, and scrumptious, ghee-roasted chickpea flour. Photo: Sai Raje

I often remember this very traditional sweet from my childhood because I rarely ever got to eat it. It was among my favourite sweet treats, but for some reason, was made only once a year, on the day before the Ganapati festivities.

Inexplicably, I never had the good sense to ask my mother to make it either, which left me pining for it most part of the year.

Ninava (pronounced nee-nah-vuh), is a dense, moist cake like sweet, made with that classic combination of coconut milk and jaggery, and scrumptious, ghee-roasted chickpea flour. I am told that the dish is unique to the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus (CKPs), a community in Maharashtra known for its love for good food (an old joke being that the wealthiest of this lot squandered their riches over fine food and drink!).

Last week, I attempted my own version of the ninava, helped along by the recipe published in my grandmother Shakuntala Mohile’s book, Paramparik CKP Pakakriya (traditional CKP recipes; Audumbar Prakashan). The biggest difference in my version was that unlike my grandmother, who steam-cooked the ninava, I spread the batter in a brownie tin and baked it in the oven. I must add; I did this because a footnote in Aji’s recipe insisted that the reader try baking it for better flavour.  

“We didn’t have ovens back then. Ninava is much tastier baked, than steamed,” she said, after having tasted a bite of my baked version.

The traditional and more authentic version calls for thick, handmade coconut milk, made by soaking, pressing and sieving grated coconut in hot water. But my being hard pressed for time did not help matters, and I resorted to a cheat’s route by using coconut milk from a tetrapak (a fact I conveniently avoided telling my grandmother). 

Rest assured, the little deception did not seem to make any difference to the final result. For an even richer and scrumptious version, you can pan-fry the ninava squares in some ghee after they are baked, which give them a crispy brown outer layer to die for.

Ninava 

Pronounced (nee-na-vuh)

Coconut milk, Chickpea flour and Jaggery Cake

Recipe translated from Paramparik CKP Pakakriya (in Marathi) by Shakuntala Mohile 

Ingredients 

1 cup chickpea flour (besan)

¼ cup whole wheat flour

Milk of 1 coconut or 2 small tetrapaks coconut milk

1 cup grated jaggery

3-4 teaspoons clarified butter (ghee)

10-12 green cardamom pods, seeds crushed

Large pinch grated nutmeg (optional)

Small pinch of salt

Method

Mix in the chickpea and whole wheat flour. Saute the flour mixture in a pan with the ghee on a low flame, until the chickpea flour loses its raw smell and turns light brown.

In a separate bowl, mix the jaggery into the coconut milk by hand, until it dissolves completely. Add a pinch of salt to this mixture. 

Now, little by little, add the roasted flour to the milk mixture. Mix in thoroughly for a smooth batter or use an electric hand blender to get rid of any lumps of flour.

Add powdered cardamom and nutmeg to the batter, and transfer to a pan. Stir the mixture constantly on low heat until it takes on a thick paste like consistency. 

Transfer the mixture to a greased 9-inch square baking tin.

Bake at 150 degree Celsius in a pre-heated oven for 25 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the centre comes out clean. Let cool and cut into squares.