How to make milk Burfi?

Milk Burfi is popular confection in North India made with milk sugar nuts and Ghee

Normally, whole un-pasteurized water-buffalo milk is cooked down at about 180º F to 30% of its original volume. Sugar and other ingredients are added, cooked again till you have the consistency of stiff dough. The Burfi dough is than poured on to a greased pan forming a slab about ½" thick. Edible silver leaf is applied to the top surface. When cool, the slab is cut into diamonds.

I will use an exemplar recipe to explain the cooking techniques.

Exemplar Recipe

You can follow this recipe to make Almond Milk Burfi, Pistachio Milk Burfee, or Cashew Milk Burfee.

Ingredients

1. Whole milk: 2 Quarts
2. Sugar: 1 Cup

3. All purpose flour (Maida): 2 Tablespoons (Optional)
4. Ghee (Clarified Butter): ¼ Cup
5. Cardamom seeds ground: ½ teaspoon
6. Blanched Nuts: 1¼ Cup

Method

Process Nuts

You need ground nuts as well as crushed or sliced nuts. The ground nuts act as thickener, add to texture and flavor.

Process 1 cup of nuts in a food processor to form a nut flour. Process the remaining nuts to very coarse crush.

Reduce Milk

In total, the milk has to be reduced to 25 to 30%, or 2 to 2.4 cups. If it is a plain Burfi, we can just do that reduction now. However, normally nuts are added to Burfi. So we will reduce the milk in to steps. We will reduce it by 60% to 3.2 cups here. Then we will reduce it further after adding nut flour.

Heat Milk in a heavy bottom pan to 180ºF. Reduce milk by about 60%, or about 3.2 cups. After evaporation you 40% or 8*0.4 = 3.2 cups in volume left.

You can skip this step and just use 3.2 cups of evaporated milk. Evaporated milk is same as reducing milk by 60%.

Thickeners

1. Stir in nut flour.

Cook about 10 minutes till the nut flour is consumed. Reduce the mixture to about 2½ cups.

2. Mix Flour and Sugar in a separate bowl. Add the mix and stir.

3. Add Ghee and crushed nuts.

Cook till you have the consistency of stiff bread dough.

Do not add sugar to milk in the beginning.

Prolonged cooking of protein and  sugar will give it a caramelized color.

Maida (All Purpose floor) or Arrowroot to make the Burfi firmer

Final Assembly

Pours dough onto a greased cookie pan. Smooth it with a spatula to form a ½" thick slab. Let it cool. When at room temperature, cut it in to diamond shapes and store in the refrigerator.