Recipe: Helly Raichura’s Rose Shrikhand Is a Dessert Worth Waiting For

Shrikhand is a rather simple dessert in Indian cooking. It is essentially a sweetened hung yoghurt with added flavours and nuts. For Gujaratis, it is a special thali dessert (a large plate containing a variety of foods); no Gujarati thali is complete without a dollop.

In summer, it is often loaded with fresh mango, and in winter it is topped with badam (almond), pista (pistachio nut) and kesar (saffron) – a holy trinity of dessert flavourings and always a crowd favourite. I enjoy these flavours dearly, but I wanted to experiment with a new flavour in fermented sour berries, the essence of rose and the crunch of lace cookies.

Rose shrikhand, fermented blueberries and lace cookies by Helly Raichura

Serves 2
Preparation time: 30 minutes, plus 2–4 days to ferment, and overnight to dehydrate rose petals and drain yoghurt
Cooking time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

Fermented blueberries
100g blueberries
10g sea salt

Rose dust
Petals from 4 large, perfumed roses (use store-bought dried rose petals if you don’t want to dehydrate your own; dried rose is available from Indian grocers and some supermarkets)

Shrikhand
750g full-fat (whole) yoghurt
60g icing sugar

Lace cookies
80g unsalted butter
125g brown sugar
2 tbsp full-cream (whole) milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
50g plain (all-purpose) flour
55g ground almonds
Pinch of salt

Utensils
Vacuum-seal bag

Method

You will need to start this recipe 2–4 days in advance.

To ferment the blueberries, wash and pat them dry with paper towel, then add to a vacuum-seal bag with the salt and leave at room temperature to ferment for 2–4 days (depending on the temperature – the warmer the climate, the faster fermentation will occur), or until the bag fills with air. Decant into a sterilised glass jar and refrigerate.

For the rose dust, wash the rose petals and pat dry with paper towel. Place them in a dehydrator and dehydrate overnight. Once dried, blitz to a fine powder in a blender.

For the shrikhand, add the yoghurt and sugar to a bowl and whisk well. Place a fine-mesh sieve lined with a piece of muslin (cheesecloth) over a bowl. Spoon in the yoghurt mixture, gathering the muslin so it hangs over the sides, and transfer to the fridge to drain overnight.

Once you have the above components ready, preheat the oven to 160°C.

For the lace cookies, heat the butter, brown sugar and milk in a saucepan over a medium–low heat until the sugar has melted and the mixture just comes to the boil.

Remove from the heat and add the vanilla extract, flour, ground almonds and a pinch of salt. Stir until completely combined, then allow to cool for about 5 minutes.

Line two baking trays with baking paper and place tablespoons of cookie dough on the trays, spaced well apart to allow for spreading.

Bake for 7–10 minutes, or until the cookies are golden in colour. Remove from the oven and leave to come to room temperature, then break into shards. Store in an airtight container.

Assemble the shrikhand, fermented blueberries, lace cookies and rose dust in a glass coupe to serve.

This is an edited extract from The Food of Bharat by Helly Raichura, published by Hardie Grant Books. Photography by Jana Langhorst and Brett Cole.