Punjabi cuisine is popular worldwide for its rich and flavorful dishes. Be it Sarson Da Saag or Butter Chicken, Punjabi food lovers never seem to get enough of it! However, no meal is complete without a relishing sweet bite at the end. Punjabi meals are no different!
Punjabi Desserts are essential to complete meals in every sense possible. They add another level of satiation to the Punjabi food experience. And you’ll find all kinds of desserts and sweets in Punjabi cuisine for every kind of palette. With that said, we have written about the 10 best ones – along with their names in the Punjabi language – that you should try out today!
Top 5 Punjabi Sweets
Sweets are considered comfort food for some, and the same can be said when we’re talking about Punjabi people. You see, they love desserts so much, which is why there’s no surprise why they have several traditional recipes for this type of food alone. Let’s get to know the five best below!
Kalakand (ਕਲਾਕੰਦ)
Kalakand is an important sweet, especially during festivals. It’s the crown of Punjabi cuisine. You miss the whole experience if you go to Punjab and do not try this delicious sweet dish.
Recipe: Ingredients
Kalakand consists of condensed milk, ghee, sugar, small pieces of almonds, milk powder, and pistachio. You’d also need some alum and lime juice to curdle the milk.
Preparation
- Take a frying pan and add the required amount of milk depending on the quantity of kalakand. One liter would do the job on average.
- Cook the milk until it shrinks to the half quantity you had put on.
- Add half a teaspoon of alum and one teaspoon of lime juice to reduced milk.
- Keep stirring in the mixture until it becomes thinner and thinner.
- After that, add ghee (clarified butter) and stir it continuously until lime juice and alum separate the milk and give it a granular look.
- Add sugar and stir it until it sticks, indicating that it is thoroughly cooked.
- Spread it on a flat dish or a plate, and garnish with chopped almonds and pistachios.
- Wait for a few hours, cut the thickened sweet into small pieces, and you are ready to taste this yummy dessert.
Rice Kheer (ਖੀਰ)
Rice kheer is one of the most straightforward sweet recipes you might have ever experienced. It is mainly prepared in religious festivals in India, like Eid, Holi, Diwali, etc. Rice kheer has different names in India as it’s called Kheer (ਖੀਰ) in North India and payasam (ਪਾਯਸਮ) in South India. Whenever you get a chance to give this delicious lovely a try, do not miss it.
Recipe: Ingredients
If you want to cook this kheer, you need to get milk, rice, sugar, some dry fruits, raisins, water, and saffron (optional) will add additional Punjabi flavor to the dish.
Preparation
- The first thing that you need to do is wash the rice well.
- Take a pan and put milk on medium flame to boil.
- Add rice to milk and keep stirring so the rice does not stick to the bottom of the pan.
- You need to wait for a few minutes so that the rice comes to be cooked well and reaches the surface of the milk.
- After this, you will notice that the milk and rice mixture will attain a creamy consistency.
- Add chopped nuts and sugar and keep stirring until it mixes well.
- In the end, add evaporated milk to give this inviting sweet a more creamy and velvety texture.
- Switch the flame off, and you are ready to eat this flavorful sweet.
Gajar Ka Halwa Or Carrot Halwa Or Gajrela (ਗਜਰੇਲਾ)
Gajar ka halwa (ਗਾਜਰ ਦਾ ਹਲਵਾ) translates to carrot halwa, and it is Punjab’s most memorable and demanding winter dish. Spending winters without having this comforting dish is like visiting Dubai and not seeing Burj Khalifa.
Recipe: Ingredients
You must be curious to know the ingredients for this perfect winter sweet. So, the ingredients required are grated carrots, condensed milk, ghee, fresh cream, khoya (milk solids), clarified butter, cardamom powder, raisins, and almonds.
Preparation
- Add ghee to a pan and put it on medium flame.
- Add grated carrots when it turns hot.
- Cook the carrots properly for like 10 minutes.
- On the other side, take sugar, milk, and khoya, if available, and mix them well.
- Add this mixture to cooked carrots and turn the flame low for 7-8 minutes.
- After this, garnish the gajar ka halwa with chopped nuts, and you are ready to taste this luscious dessert after 2 minutes.
Gajar ka halwa tastes yummy when you eat it hot, but it tastes no less than a tempting dessert, even if you taste it at room temperature.
Milk Barfi (ਬਰਫੀ)
Barfi is one of my favorite sweets! It is the most basic and most essential sweet present in every Indian home at every celebration. No celebration is complete without having a big bite of milk barfi!
Recipe: Ingredients
The ingredients you need on your kitchen slab are milk powder, cardamom powder, sugar, ghee, water, and of course, evaporated milk as it is a milk barfi.
Preparation
- The first thing that you need to do is take milk powder and add it to evaporated milk. Make it a tight dough having a perfect and consistent texture.
- Keep the dough in the freezer to make it a little tighter, and grate it.
- Then, take a frying pan and heat oil or ghee on a low flame.
- Add the grated mixture to the fried ghee and add sugar to your taste.
- Add some water and dust cardamom powder to it.
- Let the mixture be cooked until the water evaporates and the mixture tightens up.
- Dish it out on a tray, make small pieces, and you are all set to enjoy this dessert with your family.
Sooji Halwa (ਸੂਜੀ ਦਾ ਹਲਵਾ)
Even if you know very little about Punjabi desserts, there is still a good chance that you must have heard about sooji halwa, one of the favorite after-meal toothsome sweets. It is quick to prepare and your go-to Indian or Punjabi dessert to make for a late night craving.
Recipe: Ingredients
If you want to prepare this dish, do not worry, as it requires some of the most common ingredients found in every kitchen. It needs sooji (semolina), ghee, water, and sugar as basic ingredients. Almonds and sultanas/kishmish (raisins) are add-ons.
Preparation
- First and foremost, you need to take a pan and put it on low flame.
- Add semolina and fry it until it gets separated from each other.
- Add ghee and keep stirring until it is mixed up well, and you will feel a pleasant fragrance from this mixture.
- After some stirring, the mixture will get a lovely brown color.
- Now boil water and mix sugar in it.
- Add this sugar syrup to the brownish semolina mixture and stir it properly.
- Keep stirring until the water gets absorbed and the mixture obtains the thick texture like halwa mostly does.
- Take it off the heat and garnish it with almonds and raisins.
Sooji halwa is an easy recipe everyone learns quickly and loves to cook. So, next time you get find yourself having some free time for cooking, give this recipe a try. You will not regret this for sure.
More Punjabi Desserts And Sweets
Here are some more Punjabi desserts that you can buy or try to make at home.
- Panjiri (ਪੰਜੀਰੀ): Panjiri is the most basic sweet item that is made in almost every Punjabi household. The wheat flour is roasted in ghee and then flavored with sugar and cardamom powder. Some people also add roasted nuts like almonds and raisins to it.
- Pinni (ਪਿੰਨੀ): Pinni is an upgraded version of Panjiri with more added nuts. It is made into balls with the help of a generous amount of ghee.
- Meetha Puda (ਮੀਠਾ ਪੂਡਾ): This dish is equivalent to pancakes. It is made using flour, milk, sugar, and cardamom powder.
- Besan Barfi (ਬੇਸਨ ਬਰਫੀ): Besan is chickpea flour. So, Besan Barfi is made by roasting chickpea flour in ghee and flavored with sugar, cardamom powder and added nuts.
- Shakkarpare (ਸ਼ੱਕਰਪਾਰੇ): This one is a festival favorite. Diamond shaped strips of rolled out all-purpose flour dough are fried in ghee or refined oil, and dunked in sugar syrup. These are also prepared as tea-time snacks.
Wrapping Up
You can read more about the traditional Punjabi meals and Punjabi cuisine on the Ling blog. For more dedicated learning, you can choose to download the Ling app. It is a practical and handy application that makes language-learning a fun activity rather than a boring humdrum.
So, if you want to learn the Punjabi language, the Ling app will make it easy! Download the app from Google Playstore or App Store and start learning Punjabi now!
Updated by Punya
