Hello my lovely readers, Hope you all doing well! Today’s recipe is special sweet dish made from ripen pumpkin. Actually my plan was to post this recipe when the onam flowers starts budding. If I wait for the perfect time the pumpkin from my mom’s vegetable garden will not exist. I have made this using fresh coconut milk the key ingredient, and I clearly explain to take coconut milk for this payasam.
Usually for this kind of payasam(pradhaman) the main ingredient (here pumpkin) is cooked and grind into paste. Here I skipped that step to get the real tang of pumpkin. Two types of milk consistency is taken for the preparation. Thick and thin coconut milk which is taken using small coconut sack. Hope you all love this..
INGREDIENTS
- 2 cups ripen cubed pumpkin
- 7 jaggery cubes
- 2 big coconut
- 2 tbsp ghee
- a pinch of salt
- 3 cardamom (crushed)
- 2 pinch cumin seeds (crushed)
- 1/4 cup chopped coconut pieces
- Water required (cooking pumpkin, making jaggery syrup and for coconut milk)
INSTRUCTIONS
Cook the pumpkin cubes with 4 tbsp of water in a pressure cooker (2 whistles). Let it cool naturally and mash it with your spatula.
Meanwhile in a sauce pan put the jaggery with 2tbsp of water and make the jaggery syrup in medium flame until all the cubes melts and a foam appears. Don’t burn it, keep an eye on it. Keep it aside.
Take the coconuts and shred it into a bowl. You can use a very big coconut or two medium sized.
After that add 2 tbsp of warm water and squeeze the coconut shreds using your clean hands. This helps to get the thick milk from the coconut.
Then take a clean cotton cloth and place the coconut shreds in it and fold the cloth into a small sack. Carefully squeeze the sack and collect the thick milk into a clean bowl. The thick milk is less in quantity, which enhance the flavour of payasam.
Again take all the shredded coconut from sack and blend it in a mixer grinder with 1/2 cup of warm water. Again do the same sack technique and squeeze all the milk. Thus we collected thin coconut milk.
Now lets cook. Take cooked pumpkin in pan with thick bottom and roast it with 2tbsp of ghee and stir continuously in medium flame until all the water content disappears and ghee appears. Then add the prepared jaggery syrup.
Stir continuously until you get a brown halwa texture. Put a pinch of salt and mix well.
Add the thin coconut milk and stir continuously in high flame.
Turn the high flame into low when the liquid starts to bubble and slightly burst.
Turn off the flame and add the thick coconut milk.
For flavouring take a sauce pan, heat 1 tbsp ghee and roast the chopped coconut pieces until it gets a golden brown colour. switch off the flame and add your crushed cardamon and cumin ( your choice, you can put dry ginger powder).
Pour the ghee seasoning into the payasam and mix.
Serve hot.
Enjoy!
Happy cooking!!
NOTES
- Try to take yellow pumpkin which have sweet smell.
- Don’t burn the jaggery syrup stir continuously.
TASTY SERVINGS 