Milk Pedas (doodh Peda)

Wish you all a very happy republic day.

“Ohh..today is April 10th, so your exam results must be out. Did you pass? Where are the pedas ?” this was a general question for us when we were in primary schools (1st to 7th standard/grade is called primary school in India, I have no idea what it is called in other countries). It was a kind of tradition for us to distribute pedas among neighbors/relatives when we got the results. Not any pedas , it had to be home made smooth, delicious milk pedas . I specifically remember this because I would actually pester aayi to make pedas for me, so that I could give to my favorite neighbors.

Thats not the only occasion when these pedas made their appearance. They were an integral part of any happy occasion for us. Got engaged? distribute pedas . Gave birth to a baby? distribute pedas . There were hundreds of such occasions on which these beauties would make an appearance.

I never understood whats the deal with happiness and pedas . I guess it all started from the fact that milk and sugar are the basic components found in any Indian home. I remember aayi would make them in big bulk. They were always the beautiful creamy color and had melt-in-the-mouth-delicious taste.

So, recently when I was talking to aayi, she reminded me about these pedas . I got all excited about it. Even though she told me to use khoya/khova to make my life easy, I disagreed. I said, I will atleast make it once from scratch. She said it has to be made on a very low heat and takes a very long time.

When she said long time, I thought may be she is talking about 1hr or so, and I thought I can handle it easily. So I started making the pedas on one beautiful evening. I started with 4 cups of milk. I kept it on a medium heat and once in a while gave it good stir. As usual, I was multitasking – doing a thousand things with this. After 1 hr, the milk looked almost the same volume (it must have reduced about 1/2 inch or so, but not at all noticeable at that time). After 2 hrs, it had reduced a bit and the color had started turning slightly red. I knew something went wrong there because aayi’s pedas never had a red color. Along with reducing milk, my patience was also reducing. After 2 and 1/2 hrs, I added sugar and kept on mixing. It still didn’t have any signs of becoming hard. I knew that it had to be cooked till some white edges show up. I stirred and stirred and stirred till it got almost dry. Then I decided its time to take it off the heat. I took it on a plate and tried giving them nice shape. By then, they had already become hard and so red that I was sure if I heated them more, they would completely burn. V, who was looking at me, said, I should make it like pedas and not small balls. (May be it was his lucky day, I didn’t throw a fit at him for saying that).

After that incident I swore that it was my first and last attempt at making pedas . I promptly declared to aayi that she had given me a wrong recipe and how could she do that. I also told her that I have joined “I hate peda ” group. Poor aayi, I never imagined she would have felt bad about it. For next two weeks, everyday when I talked to her, she told me how sad she was for all my effort at making pedas didn’t bear fruit. I didn’t take it seriously for 2-3days, but then it got into my little brain that she was infact really sad about it. Not because I wasted 4 cups of milk or because of my oath of not trying it again, but because she knew how much difficult it was to make them and she thought I must be really upset about it. So I assured her that I will try it again some time and this time no matter what, I will make sure it comes out right. She gave me few more tips this time. She said if I want to get them light in color, I should continuously stir the milk and also should make it on a real low heat.

So last week, on a Saturday morning, when we had lost internet and TV connection and having a heavy snowfall, I decided to make this again (well, I needed something to kill the time). I started at 8 AM. This time I kept the heat on medium-low. I kept a continuous watch on it. For the first hour, I stirred the milk once in every 3-5 mins. Then I started mixing continuously. After 15mins, I was exhausted, so pulled a chair near the stove. That didn’t work out very well, because the stove level is higher than the chair, so I had keep my hand in raised position.

Then like a lightening it flashed… ‘Aayi sits on the kitchen counter(or platform as we called it) to make it easier. Grandma used to keep her stove on the flour and sit with her legs stretched’. Ahh..that was the best position, with your hands at a higher level than the stove. There is no way I could take the stove out from the cabinet, so I followed aayi’s method. That was so cool. Next 3 hrs, I didn’t budge from that position. I even refused to take any calls from India(usually Saturdays we call friends or family). V promptly told them all that I was not going to talk to any of them that day. (well, he must be very happy to enjoy 3-4 hrs of silence at home. After about 2 hrs I realized he was totally immersed in his favorite hobby of browsing without a constant nagging from me, he had not even told me internet connection was back. Anyway…). I got so bored, so I took my laptop in left hand, while continuously stirring the milk with right (V was pretty sure I would either burn the laptop or break it into pieces that day). Well..I have bored you all enough..it was a happy ending story – I had made perfect beautiful pedas :). I was ecstatic, never been so happy for any other dish. Don’t call me crazy if I say I had made 15 pedas in the end. Not very tempting considering it took 4 hrs of hard work and 4 cups of milk. But V was more than happy, he got 4 hrs of lonely time with his laptop, he got to see a break dance(??) after the success and also got to eat delicious pedas .

Moral of the story – “ Sabar ka phal meetha hota hai ” – The fruit of patience is always sweet. Attempt this only when you have a very high patience. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest patience you have, the amount of patience required for this is about 15.

Be ready to throw it out if it goes wrong, it only comes right with trial and error. If you are angry on someone and you think few hours of silence will calm you down, attempt this :). Do not blame me if you don’t get it right, there is nothing wrong with the recipe, when you remove it from the flame – is the decision maker. If you remove it little early, it does not get hard enough. In that case, you can heat it again and try to give it a shape again. If you take it too late, it becomes hard like rock, so to be safe, better to take it early.

All jokes apart, if you want to make your life easier, use khoya/khova to make this. I think condensed milk also should work fine in this. You can make it little by little, cook the milk for about an hour. Then refrigerate and continue next day, aayi takes sufficient breaks like this to make it easier.

There are other modern ways of doing it – like microwave pedas . I haven’t tried any of these.

Hats off to aayi who would make them very frequently and in very big batches. I am not sure I would reach there any time. As I said, making them in this color is not a small thing and her pedas always had this color.

In the pictures, you can see some cracks on the pedas . Thats the next thing I will work on. I should have taken it out a tad bit early.

Ingredients:

Milk pedas (Doodh peda)

Ingredients

• 4 cups milk
• 1 cup sugar
• Cardamom powder
• Ghee

Instructions

• Heat the milk on a medium low heat stirring continuously. (First hour, stir it only once in about 3-5mins but after 1st hr you need to stir continuously).
• When the milk is reduced to one cup (measure it after approximately 3hrs) to see if it is 1 cup.
• Then add the sugar. Keep mixing.
• When it starts leaving edges and looks quite dry, add the cardamom powder.
• Take it out on a plate greased with ghee.
• Let it cool to room temperature.
• Make the pedas.

PS: Use whole milk for a better result. Use thick bottomed pans for reducing milk, since milk sticks to bottom very easily. A wide bottomed pan saves a lot of time. If you have a large quantity of milk, you can keep the heat on medium initially for about hour or so and keep stirring frequently. Some people add some dry fruits or saffron/food color to give extra flavor/color to it. I prefer the pure one, so I haven’t used any.

Milk pedas (Doodh peda)

Ingredients

• 4 cups milk
• 1 cup sugar
• Cardamom powder
• Ghee

Instructions

• Heat the milk on a medium low heat stirring continuously. (First hour, stir it only once in about 3-5mins but after 1st hr you need to stir continuously).
• When the milk is reduced to one cup (measure it after approximately 3hrs) to see if it is 1 cup.
• Then add the sugar. Keep mixing.
• When it starts leaving edges and looks quite dry, add the cardamom powder.
• Take it out on a plate greased with ghee.
• Let it cool to room temperature.
• Make the pedas.

Yay!!! I am a member of Daring Baker’s group now, those who don’t know about Daring baker’s challenge, please read this .

For last many months, I have been drooling over Meeta’s gorgeous entries for this challenge month after month. I still don’t know how she manages to make them look so beautiful. I was just enjoying her pictures for so long and then one day, they came up with bread challenge . Then I baked the stuffed buns at home. Thats when I thought I had to seriously consider joining this group, not because I am a daring baker yet, but I would love to become a daring baker. Since I have baked many cakes so far and have kind of basic idea, I thought its the most suitable time.

So I mailed Lis and Ivonne asking if I could join. I was very surprised at their prompt reply, they asked me to join from January. So finally here I am with my first challenge. There will be a challenge every month & on the date specified, I am supposed to post about that challenge. I am hoping that I can keep up with this (did I say I am very bad at planning?).

This month’s challenge was Lemon Meringue Pie. Jen from Canadian baker challenged us to bake this beautiful pie. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a very simple challenge compared to what DBs have been baking so far.

When I told Meeta I joined DB, she offered to help me if I needed anything. She also said she had baked the pie. This was some 2 weeks ago. Since the post date was 28th, I was taking it cool. But after I came to know she had already baked it, some warning bells started ringing in my head. Considering I mess up everything when I am in hurry, I decided to bake it immediately. I wanted to keep some room for correction.

So I started with LMP on a weekday again (when will I ever learn not to try anything on weekdays? ufff..). I successfully made the crust and then I realized I didn’t have cornstarch. Why I didn’t think about that before?, because I thought corn flour could be a substitute for cornstarch. The corn flour I had was yellowish in color and when I googled, I came to know cornstarch is white in color. I didn’t want to take a chance. So I ran to grocery store to buy it. That took some time, so I started feeling the pressure, it was already late and I was not sure if I could take any breaks in between.

According to me, the most difficult part of this LMP was making the meringue. I have a hand blender. So it took a very long time to beat the meringue to correct consistency. The blender started getting hot and I was a bit worried that it might blow up on me. Finally I gave up after some time. So when I started decorating, the meringue was not holding it’s shape. Anyway, I continued as it is.

I feel the pie came out fine. It was holding its shape properly. I have to still work on the crust. I could not give a nice shape to it due to lack of time. I think I rolled it a bit too thick. I should take care of it next time. So when I refrigerated the remaining pie(Jen had mentioned that we have to finish the pie within 6 hours, but the quantity was too huge for us, so I had to refrigerate it), the crust became very hard. The pie was a bit too lemony for our taste even though I reduced the amount of lemon juice in filling. I think next time I will still reduce the amount.

The funniest thing was, since I have never used cream of tartar, I didn’t know how it looked like. So I started searching for it in baking isle of supermarket. After spending about 15mins, I asked for some help. The lady told me it is a white colored powder and available with other spices. (Yeah, I could have saved that time if I had used google, stupid me).

Pardon me for my not-so-good pictures. I was so tired at the end, I could not take any good ones. I didn’t check the pictures for few days and till then the pie was over. So I decided to post whatever I had. I will try my best to do a better job next time. Since 28th is a extremely busy day at office, I am posting this on 27th mid night. Its already past 11:30 here and I saw many posts of LMP on other blogs, I decided to post mine too.

These are the exact details given by Jen and I followed every single step she mentioned. Thanks Jen.

For the Crust: ¾ cup (180 mL) cold butter cut into ½-inch (1.2 cm) pieces 2 cups (475 mL) all-purpose flour ¼ cup (60 mL) granulated sugar ¼ tsp (1.2 mL) salt ? cup (80 mL) ice water

For the Filling: 2 cups (475 mL) water 1 cup (240 mL) granulated sugar ½ cup (120 mL) cornstarch 5 egg yolks, beaten ¼ cup (60 mL) butter ¾ cup (180 mL) fresh lemon juice ( I used just 1/2 cup lemon juice ) 1 tbsp (15 mL) lemon zest 1 tsp (5 mL) vanilla extract

For the Meringue: 5 egg whites, room temperature ½ tsp (2.5 mL) cream of tartar ¼ tsp (1.2 mL) salt ½ tsp (2.5 mL) vanilla extract ¾ cup (180 mL) granulated sugar

For the Crust: Make sure all ingredients are as cold as possible. Using a food processor or pastry cutter and a large bowl, combine the butter, flour, sugar and salt. Process or cut in until the mixture resembles coarse meal and begins to clump together. Sprinkle with water, let rest 30 seconds and then either process very briefly or cut in with about 15 strokes of the pastry cutter, just until the dough begins to stick together and come away from the sides of the bowl. Turn onto a lightly floured work surface and press together to form a disk. Wrap in plastic and chill for at least 20 minutes.

Allow the dough to warm slightly to room temperature if it is too hard to roll. On a lightly floured board (or countertop) roll the disk to a thickness of ? inch (.3 cm). Cut a circle about 2 inches (5 cm) larger than the pie plate and transfer the pastry into the plate by folding it in half or by rolling it onto the rolling pin. Turn the pastry under, leaving an edge that hangs over the plate about ½ inch (1.2 cm). Flute decoratively. Chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350ºF (180ºC). Line the crust with foil and fill with metal pie weights or dried beans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Carefully remove the foil and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes, until golden. Cool completely before filling.

For the Filling: Bring the water to a boil in a large, heavy saucepan. Remove from the heat and let rest 5 minutes. Whisk the sugar and cornstarch together. Add the mixture gradually to the hot water, whisking until completely incorporated.

Return to the heat and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly until the mixture comes to a boil. The mixture will be very thick. Add about 1 cup (240 mL) of the hot mixture to the beaten egg yolks, whisking until smooth. Whisking vigorously, add the warmed yolks to the pot and continue cooking, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a boil. Remove from the heat and stir in butter until incorporated. Add the lemon juice, zest and vanilla, stirring until combined. ( At this stage the filling had become quite thick ). Pour into the prepared crust. Cover with plastic wrap to prevent a skin from forming on the surface, and cool to room temperature.

For the Meringue: Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC). Using an electric mixer beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar, salt and vanilla extract until soft peaks form. Add the sugar gradually, beating until it forms stiff, glossy peaks( This takes a real long time, so do not loose patience ). Pile onto the cooled pie, bringing the meringue all the way over to the edge of the crust to seal it completely. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden. Cool on a rack. Serve within 6 hours to avoid a soggy crust.

Makes one 10-inch (25 cm) pie