What You Need:
- Evaporated/Condensed Milk Powder - 2 Cups
- All Purpose Flour (unsalted) - 1/2 Cup
- Unsalted Butter (melted) - 1/4 Cup (4 Tablespoons)
- Baking Powder - 3/4 Teaspoon
- Milk (non-skimmed) - 1 Cup
- Sugar - 2 Cups
- Water - 3 Cups
- Cardamon Seeds
What To Do:
Making the Dough
1. Take a bowl and dump in the Milk Powder, All Purpose Flour Baking Powder, and the Butter. Mix all these ingredients together and make sure NOT to use the blender. Just stir with a spoon or get your hands in there and use those to mix it all up. The goal is to make the butter blend evenly with the dry ingredients. Make sure to take your time doing this step because having a smooth mixture helps with the next part.
2. Add in the milk in little increments. The reason that you are adding in the milk is because you are going to make the dough. So, the point is to add a little and use your hands to really mix it in, and then add some more. Repeat until all the milk is gone. At this point, you should have a dough like texture similar to pizza dough. IF the dough is too powdery or flaky, you need to add a little more milk.
3. So, this is your dough. It needs to chill out for about twenty minutes. While you stick it in the fridge and let it rise up and do its thing, you can make the syrup for your Gulab Jamuns.
Making the Syrup
1. Choose a pan that is large enough to let most of your liquid rest about 1/3 of the length of the pan. Basically, you are going to put the Gulab Jamuns in here after frying them so you want to make sure that you will have room to fit all of them.
2. Add Water to the pan and Sugar. Stir a little bit to make sure that the Sugar blends evenly.
3. Turn the heat to the lowest and use a simmer plate to make sure that you are subjecting this mixture to the lowest heat possible.
4. Add in some Cardamom Seeds to this mixture and let it simmer there until you are ready to use it.
Frying The Jamuns
1. While you are waiting for your dough to be ready, another thing you can prepare is your skillet. Since you will be deep frying the dough, you need to make sure that you use enough oil to cover the dough balls. Let the skillet and oil heat up on high heat.
2. Once the oil is ready - you can tell this by dropping a tiny bit of dough in the oil and if it rises up really quickly and gets lots of bubbles around it, your oil is ready! - you are ready to make dough balls.
3. Take a piece of dough, roughly half the size of a golf ball and shape it into a sphere.
4. TURN THE HEAT TO LOW-MEDIUM. (very important) and gently fry your dough. Make sure that you do not put too many dough balls/Jamuns in the oil because they do tend to expand.
5. Once your jamuns turn a nice golden brown color, fish them out of the oil and stick them in the water/sugar mixture that you have chilling on a low simmer.
AND.. there you go, making Gulab Jamuns is surprisingly easy and kind of fun.
