Made Cashew burfi for Deepavali sweet this year and it came out great!
Have been refining this recipe over the years with different results but we are locked into this final recipe.
Turns out the 4:3:2:1 ratio for select burfi's that my Lalli chitti taught me 20 years ago works for Cashew burfi as well!
We got a 100 pieces or so.
Some notes before the video:
1. What you don't see in the video is that I doubled all quantities. (you see 200 grams of cashew or 2 cups of broken cashew being ground.. there was another identical batch added to the mix before heating)
2. This process is very very labor intensive. There is a lot of stirring almost 40 minutes of stirring on low heat and the last 10 minutes is extremely challenging. The thing is so thick that stirring it is difficult, but stir you must or it will start browning.
3. It is more art than science when it comes to realizing "pour time". If you pour too early, it will be like a Halwa and will be a little gummy to eat. If you pour too late, the whole thing is hard and tastes like brittle candy or it has pieces of brittle hard stuff embedded in a matrix of the gummy stuff. That will taste good but kind of like having the almond noughats in chocholate texture.. The minute you start seeing the entire thing stick to your ladle and come off the pan as one blob, pour it! That is the secret.
The thing has to be just the right mix of crystallite stuff in an amorphous matrix..if you are a fab guy like me, think 550 C amorphous silicon!
Here is a video explaining how to make this delicious treat!
The ratios are 4 cups broken cashew : 3 cups sugar : ~2 cups milk (do 1 1/2 or even 1 and it will work) : ~ 1 cup Ghee which is added while heating and mixing
Think 4-3-2-1 and go easy on the milk and ghee.
Also made some thenkuzhal (did it with the right flour mix this time!) and San made some delicious Gulab Jamuns.
The litlte one doesn't like "nuts" except when converted to burfi's or Halwa's.
Next year we will do a Badam Halwa.
Hope you have fun making this sweet.
