Jilebi

Jilebi

Jalebi is a popular sweet in India and and even popular in the Indian subcontinent. Jalebis are always made or serve during festivals like Diwali. Mainly made of all purpose flour batter with other ingredients, it is piped directly into hot oil to make lovely spirals, fried till golden crisp, then dunked in shiny sugar syrup, removed and served either hot or cold.

The art of making these rounds of crispy jalebis in hot oil needs little practice but can be done.The recipe is given for Instant jalebis, where you do not have to make the mixture and keep overnight for fermentation as is done in a traditional jalebi making process.

But when the craving is great and you cannot wait to make them immediately, such Instant recipes come to our rescue.

Ingredients :

1 cup plain flour
1 tsp besan/chickpea flour
1/2 tsp fresh yeast crumbled . or rapid rise instant yeast , to help in quick fermentation .
1 tbsp melted ghee
1 tsp sugar
2 drops of lemon food colouring

For the sugar syrup

• 2 cup sugarfew saffron strands

• 1/4 tsp lemon juice

• oil/ghee for frying

• Method

To prepare batter

1. Sieve the flours well. Ddissolvethe yeast in 1 tbsp warm water.
2. Mix the flours,yeast solution, sugar, ghee and lemon colouring with 2/3 cup water to make a thick lumpfree batter. The batter should be thick but flow like a ribbon.

3. Keep aside for 10 minutes, the yeast will ferment.

To prepare sugar syrup

1. Dissolve the sugar in 1 cup of water and simmer till the sugar is  of a 1 string consistency.

2. Test the consistency with index finger and thumb, you will see a thin thread like string forming, that is enough.Let the syrup become warm.

Add saffron and lemon juice , mix well.

Remove the syrup from the gas and keep aside while it becomes warm.

To make jalebis

1.Heat ghee or oil in a wide broad pan, the oil should be around 1 inch deep in the pan.

2. Fill a jalebi bottle which comes with a nozzle, with the batter , then squeeze into hot oil , when medium hot. You can also use a zip loc bag to put the batter and make a small cut in the end, to get a small opening.
There are special cloth bags made for jalebis , you can buy one and use those, I do not bother as it is very easy to use a plastic cover or ziploc, just use and throw.

3 Make round spirals with batter quickly . Initially if you are not used to making jalebis, they may seem to go all around the oil, you can bring them all together with a spatula, this happened to me, as I do not make jalebis often and my first batch of batter was a little thin, so it seemed to go all over the pan..but it was set right, by bringing them together gently with a spatula.

Deep fry the jalebis till they are golden crisp, transfer immediately to the sugar syrup.
Drain the jalebis immediately and place in a plate or serve hot.

It is important to note that you do not aglow the batter to rest for more than 10 minutes.

If you do not have fresh yeast, use rapid rise Instant yeast .

Instant jilebi

Instant Jilebi