Desserts made with natural whole ingredients are the best way to avoid unhealthy market-made sweets
Desserts made with natural whole ingredients are the best way to avoid unhealthy market-made sweets
During festivals, our sugar consumption tends to increase manyfold as there is a tradition to cook, distribute and eat a lot of mithais and other types of desserts with a belief to preserve the sweetness in relationships. Mithais available in the market during the festival season are made using dubious milk products, chemical colours, preservatives and loads of processed sugar. To cater to the huge demand, shops often use the cheaper alternative to sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is known to be addictive and harms the insulin discipline in the body. These sweets also add useless calories. The tradition of sharing sweetness should not be compromised as the intention is noble, but we should always try and skip using processed sugar while making mithais at home.
We can make mithais using naturally sweet ingredients. Nature has packed eno-ugh sugar in some fruits and tubers that they qualify for a dessert, and we can dress them up to suit our desires too. These desserts made with the natural sweetness found in whole ingredients are not only healthier because whole foods have the right combination of nutrients for better absorption, the lower Glycemic index of such desserts also doesn’t let the insulin hike too much.
Sweet potato (shakarkand) is one such mithai. It used to be the dessert of the winter season some three-four decades ago. People would roast it, boil it or grill it in many ways to make the most wholesome healthy desserts. But boiled shakarkand can also be mashed and cooked with ghee till caramelised, sprinkled with nuts and cardamom and then served as a piping hot halwa. Roasted sweet potatoes can also be peeled and mixed with clotted cream to become a delicious dessert. The use of shakarkand to make sweets is a cheap yet nutritive ingredient. Rich in Vitamin A and minerals, this sweet tuber has a pleasant taste and lends a nice texture to Indian desserts like kheer, rabdi or halwa. Since it is one of the foods allowed during fasting days, shakarkand is popular during the Navratri season, and is consumed in many forms.
Natural delicacies
There are many seasonal sweets that can be cooked and consumed as alternatives to those available in the market. In the olden days, desserts were always homemade. There were simpler versions for everyday consumption, and much decorated and enriched versions for festivals and formal get-togethers. For instance, rasawal or rasiya is a dark-coloured kheer made using rice of the new crop and fresh unprocessed sugarcane juice. This is served with a dollop of fresh cream. The tradition of rasawal lives on in Bihar because it is made for prasad during the three day worship of the sun god. The much-celebrated Surya pooja is perfor-med on the sixth day after Diwali every year.
Another home-made delicacy is ripe jackfruit, which is cooked in pureed form, sometimes with added sugar or jaggery with some ghee and nuts. The puree is cooked for several hours to make a jelly-like halwa in many southern states. In central India, the fresh ripe jackfruit is often enjoyed with a mix of milk, yogurt or fresh cream.
In Himachal Pradesh, people make an apple dessert that looks like something between a crumble and halwa and flavoured with fennel, raisins, nuts and coconut. It has the mild sweetness of apple, and has a pleasant flavour that only pure fresh ingredients can bring. Fresh mangoes too are a popular dessert ingredient and are used to make aamras and shrikhand. Similar mango desserts are popular in all mango growing regions of India every summer. Sharifa or seetaphal is also used to make kulfi or rabdi during the early winter season. The sweet aromatic flesh of seeta-phal is a little hard to retrieve because of several small seeds, but once extracted, the silken texture of this fruit can be used to make wonderful desserts. Many natural ice cream companies have developed flavours using seetaphal with great results. Sitaphal or sharifa ki phirni was probably a Mughal tradition that became popular in many parts of the country.
There are also recipes that can be made throughout the year. The khajoor ka halwa is a delicacy served only in small portions because it is so rich. Sindhi sweet shops still stock khajoor ki mithai studded with nuts. Khubani ka meetha is made after stewing dry apricots with or without sugar and ser-ved with fresh cream, this dessert also came with the Mughals and is still a delicacy in Hyderabad. These dried fruits are rich in minerals and vitamins, and the sugar content is rich yet significantly less than the commercially made mithais.
But the best reason to make mithais with these dried fruits is their rich fibre content and low Glycemic index that can be lowered further by adding some ghee and nuts. Even diabetics can enjoy small portions of such mithais. Interestingly, dried apricots are very rich in Vitamin A, and adding some ghee or fresh cream to a dessert made with apricots is very useful as Vitamin A is fat soluble and this way the Vitamin gets easily absorbed by our system. The minerals in these dried fruits remain intact after cooking. Try out some of these homemade mithais using natural whole ingredients this festival season.
The author is a food and nutrition consultant
Boil the sweet potatoes in a pressure cooker with 1/2 cup of water. The sweet potato should be soft when cooked. Peel and mash using a potato masher till very smooth. Remove any rough fibre.
Heat ghee in a heavy iron kadhai (pan) or a non-stick pan.
Add the pulped sweet potatoes to the hot ghee and cook the pulp on medium flame till it starts appearing light brown and you see bits of crisp sweet potato mash.
Add chopped almonds and raisins and cook till the nuts become light brown. Add saffron and cardamom as required and serve hot.
The halwa can be spread on a metal plate and cut into squares later to make a fudge-like barfi.
A good variety of sweet potato makes sweet enough halwa, but if the sweet potato is bland, you may need to add more raisins or a little honey to sweeten it to taste.
We are a voice to you; you have been a support to us. Together we build journalism that is independent, credible and fearless. You can further help us by making a donation. This will mean a lot for our ability to bring you news, perspectives and analysis from the ground so that we can make change together.