Rosogolla / Rasgullas

Rosogollas (রসগোল্লা) or Rasgullas are the quintessential Bengali sweet and loved by almost everyone who loves sweets. Any occasion is a good occasion to indulge in Rosogollas. If you visit the home of a Bengali family, you may be served sweets for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner.

They are basically balls of cottage cheese cooked in sugar syrup. Not very difficult to make although it may seem so before you try it out. With a pressure cooker at your disposal, it becomes even easier.

Our first results. Each one turned out about 1.5 inches in diameter.

Ingredients:

Milk: 1 litre. You may use high fat milk, although we got good results from 3% fat milk. 

Vinegar: 2 tbsp mixed in ½ cup water or 1 lime

Sugar ¼ kg or as per your taste.

Rose water: few drops (optional)

Ice water: 1 litre

Servings:

Approximately 12-15 Rosogollas. 

Procedure:

Boil the milk. Once the milk comes to boil, reduce the flame and slowly add the vinegar/lime juice till the milk starts curdling. Stir the milk slowly till the milk curdles completely. Switch off the gas and pour the curdled milk (chenna) on a muslin cloth to separate the water from the chenna. Be careful when handling the hot liquid while pouring it out on the muslin cloth.

Now pour ice water over the chenna in the same muslin cloth and wash well to remove the sourness due to the vinegar/lime juice. Drain out all the water and hang the chenna in the cloth at least for 20 min so that all the water is removed. Now your chenna is ready. Knead the chenna gently. Do not knead it hard. Make small balls of chenna. It should be smooth and there shouldn’t be any cracks.

In a pressure cooker take water (sufficient to cover the chenna balls) and mix the sugar in it. Add the chenna balls and pressure cook for 1 whistle in a medium flame. And then 5 min in low flame and switch off the gas.. Open the pressure cooker only after the pressure inside the pressure cooker drops to normal. If you open the pressure cooker before the pressure normalizes, the Rosogollas may shrink. 

Optional: Once cooked, you may add few drops of rose water for added flavour. 

Refrigerate after preparing and consume hot or cold. Do not store Rosogollas for too long as the sugar syrup tends to spoil.

From 1.5 litres of milk, we got 23 Rosogollas

Tweak: Make badam milk and add chopped almonds and pista and soak these Rosogollas in the badam milk. You will have Ras Malai prepared right in your home.

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