Easy Burfi Roll Recipe

Easy Pista Mithai Without Mawa

With Diwali just a few days away, here’s another quick and easy sweet or mithai. This time we’ll make a delicious but easy to make burfi roll. You could even call it a pista mithai because we’ll use pistas in this recipe. But pistas will perhaps be the only ingredient you might not have on hand at home. The other four ingredients are simple ones that most people have in their pantry or kitchen. Not just that, you could replace the pistas with cashew nuts or almonds if you want. But in short, we’re making a really tasty but quick and easy burfi roll without using any mawa or condensed milk or a whole lot of ghee.

Some other tasty Diwali sweets you could check out are my Shortcut Motichoor Ladoos and my Delicious Rava Besan Ladoos.

Ingredients

3 ½ tbsp pure ghee

½ cup (65g) maida

2 cups (200g) milk powder / dairy whitener

1 cup + 7 tbsp (300g) sugar

1 cup water

¼ cup pistachios

A little green food colour

A little saffron

Procedure

1. Melt the ghee in a pan on medium heat. Lower the heat and add the maida and roast it lightly for 4-5 minutes with constant stirring. See that the maida changes colour only very slightly and does not brown. Turn off the heat.
2. Mix in the milk powder a little at a time.
3. In another vessel, mix the water and sugar. Heat the sugar solution on a medium flame, stirring it continuously till it reaches the single strand stage. It should be a distinct single strand that does not break easily. (This is a critical step. If the sugar syrup is not of the right consistency, the burfi won’t set properly in the expected time.) Turn off the heat.
4. Add the sugar syrup to the maida and milk powder mixture gradually and with constant stirring using a spatula. The mix should now be smooth and free from lumps. Stir in some saffron soaked in 1 tsp of water.
5. Continue stirring / whipping the mix. As you stir the mix, it will begin to cool down and will get thicker. Keep stirring the mix till it pulls away from the pan and forms a ball with a soft dough-like consistency. This could take around 15 to 20 minutes. Transfer the burfi dough ball to a lightly greased plate or shallow bowl, grease your palm with ghee liberally and knead the dough ball lightly. From now onwards you’ll have to act fast as the mix or burfi dough will start getting even firmer very quickly. If it firms up too fast, it will start cracking as you begin to shape it into a burfi roll later on. The dough ball will be lukewarm now.
6. Break off a ¼ portion of the soft dough.
7. Grind the pistachios to a fine powder and then mix this into the small dough ball along with a little green food colour. Knead the small dough ball till the green colour is mixed into it properly.
8. Flatten the larger pale yellow dough ball on a sheet of plastic or parchment paper into an elongated shape. Roll it to a thickness of a little more than ½”.
9. Flatten the smaller green ball of dough on another sheet of plastic or parchment paper. Roll it to a thickness of around ¼ ” and see that it is slightly smaller than the other sheet of dough.
10. Remove the green dough sheet from the parchment paper over which it had been rolled and position it on top of the larger dough sheet leaving a border of the pale yellow burfi dough all around. Press the green sheet down lightly.
11. Roll the burfi dough sheets into a log or cylindrical shape making use of the parchment paper to do so if necessary. Wrap it in the parchment paper sheet and set it aside to cool completely and set, for around 40 minutes at room temperature or for around 20 minutes in the fridge.
12. Unwrap the mithai roll and cut it into ½” thick slices. These slices can be stored in an airtight box where they’ll stay good at room temperature for around 10 days.

Enjoy!