I have made an amazing new kulfi-related discovery. I was having friends over for New Year’s Day lunch and making chicken biriyani. I do this a lot up my mountain. As you all know, Italian food is carbs, carbs, roast meat, overcooked vegetables done from frozen and more carbs. The puddings, cakes and croissants are all made days before they’re sold and invariably have some kind of orange-essence in them making them all taste the same. So I spend a lot of time cooking up English classics like chicken tikka masala, chicken biriyani and prawn pathia. I bring the spices in from London and go into frenzies of excitement if I find ginger or chillis in Esselunga in Marlia. So, there I am, the rain washing half the mountain away outside, the pony snorting wetly in her stable (actually the bottom of a pizza oven but nicer than it sounds) and the dog hoping for chicken skin which did, eventually, come his way, when I realise I have forgotten to make the kulfi.
I get Madhur Jaffrey out and see what she says. Boil the milk for two hours, she says. The guests arrive in ten minutes, their sparklers are by their plates, the napkins have sprigs of holly in them (no, seriously) and this huge silver reindeer candelabra I bought in Amsterdam has red and silver candles already burning on the ten antler spikes. Okay, I think, maybe I can make panna cotta and put pistachios and rose water in it or something. I looked up the recipe in The Silver Spoon. Basically, you boil a bit of milk and dissolve gelatine in it. Then you warm a lot of cream and put sugar and whatever else in it (in this case a vanilla pod, pistachio nuts and rose water). Then you leave it to set …..for at least two hours! Aaaaaargh.
But with kulfi you freeze it because it is basically ice-cream. Evaporated milk ice-cream. So, here’s the answer. Make panna cotta with gelatine. Put it in little ramekins or glasses, sprinkle pistachio nuts into it and THEN freeze it! It was kind of frozen, kind of jelly-ish, really delicious. Now I know this isn’t proper food porn with all sorts of descriptions of the waxy emerald glint of the nuts in the soft pale flesh of the trembling pudding, but it’s still quite a good invention - neither leaving it to set nor having to boil it for hours, just twenty minutes in the freezer. Ha!
