Shahi Tukra

Shahi Tukra

Who doesn’t love Shahi Tukra ?? That velvety , soft Indian bread pudding having it’s roots in Mughlai cuisine . For me it’s absolutely a dessert which I without any hesitate can call ” Beheshti” or “heavenly” in English!!! I have two different versions of making Shahi tukra . But the recipe I’m sharing today is the most authentic and easiest of the two . The other version includes making sugar syrap and rabri ( milk sauce ) separately . You have to soak the fried bread into the sugar syrup first , then the milk sauce is poured over the fried breads . But that process seem unnecessarily time consuming and laborious to me . So here you go with my super easy shahi tukra without compromising it’s shahi taste at all !!! 🙂
In the original recipe the breads were deep-fried into pure ghee!!! We just can’t think of that !!!! But to get that authentic “ghee flavor “, I mentioned a little trick in my recipe and who are health conscious and doesn’t want to deep fry the breads can go for toasted bread too . I’ll share the recipe in notes too . So please go through the notes after going through the recipe .

Ingredients :

4 slices of bread
2 cups of regular whole milk + 1 cup of evaporated milk ( see the note for the substitution)*
Sugar to taste ( around 1/2 a cup , you can always adjust the sugar to your taste)
3 cardamoms
1 small stick of cinnamon
Saffron
Rose water
Malai/ maowa / khoya
Dried nuts
Saffron food color ( optional)
Ghee 2 tbl spoon
Oil for frying the breads

Procedure:

1. Remove the crust edges from the bread and cut into any shape of your choice , rectangular, square , circle , triangle or even round .

2. Put milk in a deep bottomed pot , add cinnamon, cardamom in it and bring it to boil . Add the sugar and turn the heat to low .

3. The same time heat oil and add two tbl spoon of ghee into the oil . That would make the shahi tukra smell like fried in ghee . Deep-fry the bread slices until dark golden and crispy . The color should not be light as the color gets lighter if soaked in milk.

4. Now immediately put the fried breads into the milk . Milk shoud not be thick . Just a little reduced . that would help the fried breads to soak the milk . Remove the breads from the milk after 40 second to 1 minute or until little soft . the breads should be soft but firm . If it is too soft , it will break apart and will get mushy after final pouring of the rabri over it . so just a little while to get the breads little soft and soaked completely .

5. Arrange the soaked bread pieces on to the serving dish .

6. Now reduce the milk until thickens . You may add saffron and little food color at this point .Don’t thicken it too much because it will get thicker after cooling down . Nor it should be liquidy too . Sprinkle some rose water and take out the cinnamon, cardamoms from it . Let it cool a bit . Don’t pour the hot milk over the breads . It often makes the shahi tukra too mushy !! I like a little crunch with softness . So pour the luke warm milk over the breads . It helps to retain the good texture too .Garnish with khoya , chopped nuts , dried fruits . You can use some silver edible foil paper to get the Shahi look !!

Notes:

1. If you don’t have evaporated milk , just use 3 cups of regular whole milk with 1/4 th cup of powder milk .

2. Some use condensed milk too . If you wish , you can put condensed milk too . But then adjust the sugar .

3. Those who are health conscious can toast the bread in the oven until brown and then follow the other steps . If you toast it in oven , just apply butter or ghee over the slices of bread and then toast .

4. For the homemade maowa , khoya , you can check this link of kheer kadam, where I explained , how to make khoya at home .
https://khadizaskitchen.com/2013/11/16/kheer-kadam-an-exotic-bengali-sweet/