Skip to main content

One ingredient, a plethora of possibilities!



Ever heard of this joke?
Wife: I bought a spoon today & they gave me a 4 place dinner set for free!!
Husband: Really?? that's great.. & how much did the spoon cost?
Wife: $ 249.99...

Lets face it, all of us have sneaky stories like these that we will never share, (or .. we may brag about it on FB assuming that the ones closest to us will not notice). Well on a foodie note, yesterdays healthy light salad lunch was kind of built up on those lines.

I remember an episode of last seasons 'The next food network star' which catapulted Aarti Sequeira to Food network stardom and brought in a much needed Indian influence to the channel, one of the episodes featured a dish which called for pomegranate molasses. Now Indian cuisine puts the hallowed pomegranate to full use in the form of anardaana,  the dried version, and its powdered form, but one seldom sees it being used as a thick syrup in Indian cuisine.
OK.. the word molasses conjures up the image of something produced only on an industrial scale, of course it is a byproduct of sugar refining and how often do we refine sugar cane juice at home??,
 As one moves westward away from the Indian subcontinent, this delicious syrup establishes itself as a staple in Persian cooking. Turns out pomegranate molasses is not really a molasses at all, rather simply pomegranate juice boiled down to a concentrate. It perfectly fits the definition of sweet n' sour to a T and best of all, its a cinch to make! (albeit a tad messy!)

To make Pomegranate molasses, you need:
1 L all natural pomegranate juice.

(thats it!)


Pour the pomegrante juice into a wide skillet (I used an enamel coated one)


Boil down  till thick enough a wooden spoon drawn through the bottom will leave the bottom of the pan exposed for a couple of seconds before the molasses covers it up.

what you'll be left with is this lovely burgundy syrup that seems to be tailor made for many Indian dishes!1 L of juice yields about 1/2 a cup of molasses. (it also varies depending upon how thick you want it to be)


The first thought that came to mind when I first licked off the spoon was that a dash of salt & chilli powder & it would make a fabulous substitute for tamarind date chutney, and this eventually led me to making a lovely dressing for a summer grilled salad. Here's the recipe!


Citrus & pomegranate molasses dressing:

1 1/2 tablespoon pomegranate molasses
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
juice of 1/2 orange
1/2 teaspoon fresh orange zest
Chaat masala to taste


Combine the molasses, fresh orange juice, the olive oil, orange zest & chaat masala & whisk together till blended well. Taste and adjust for the chaat masala. set aside in refrigerator till required.



For the Salad you need: 


2 1/4 inch slices fresh pineapple
2 medium red potatoes diced
2 medium peruvian purple potatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt to taste
1 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
1 cob fresh corn
1 persian cucumber, diced OR 1/2 english hothouse cucumber (diced)
arils from 1/2 a fresh pomegranate
3 mini bell peppers finely diced (1 each of yellow, red & orange)
1 sprig mint (leaves only)
3-4 iceberg lettuce leaves

Peel & dice the potatoes. into 1/2 inch cubes. drizzle olive oil & add the sea salt & black pepper. Marinade for ~ 15 minutes. Roast till golden brown in a 400 F oven (~ 1/2 hr) or in a grill basket over a grill.
In a grill pan over high heat, grill the pineapple slices till the char marks are well defined (~ 2 minutes on each side). remove, cut each slice into 8 wedges & set aside to cool
remove the husks from the corn & grill over the stove top till the surface just begins to char. Using a kitchen knife, shave the kernels from the cob and add to a large bowl.
Stack the mint leaves over each other and finely shred into a chiffonade.
Add the cucumbers, peppers and the pomegranate arils to the corn & toss to combine. Add the pineapple & the potatoes to the mix. Drizzle with the dressing as per taste & Garnish with the fresh mint leaves. Serve on the lettuce leaves.


Bon appetit!

Comments

  1. Very interesting! I made pomegranate juice concentrate the other day. did never think of boiling the juice down to molasses thickness.
    Next time i buy pomegranates, I will have this in mind and the salad too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks!, yes, I was so pleasantly surprised by the thick molasses, its like a liquidy anaardana without the grittiness. i believe it keeps for about 6 months in the fridge!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Loved the recipe.The salad must have perked up because of the pom molasses.Kewl

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh yay! I can make pomegranate molasses at home? Three cheers for you, Niv :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. yep... it is one of those why did i wait this long to make it things & its shelf stable to boot!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oh this looks so fresh and flavourful! I can munch on this whole days :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to hear feedback from you, your thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Popular posts from this blog

Sputtering back....

I seriously feel like this scene from the movie 3 idiots .. remember this one? The way I kept racking up drafts and eventually stopped doing that as well. Lulled into complacence by the quick high from Instagram posts. Recipe measurements hastily scribbled into a Moleskine notebook faithfully depending upon my moods. The truth is that I keep over thinking the backstories needed to make the post more interesting while in reality the truth is that ideas and inspirations just occur spontaneously (like little itches , sneezes or twitches) whenever the opportunity happens to strike. Some really cool ideas that scare the beejeezus out of me and yet prove to be utterly delightful and simple in the end. Others, that seem so trivial that I feel it wouldn't be worth crowing about -- even if there are enough other recipes in that genre that get so much publicity simply because the author happens to have the right marketing knack. So in the past 4 years that I've been

Product Review: Ninja Mega Kitchen system and a recipe for Masala Dosa

 One of the biggest reasons for attending conferences is the priceless experience of meeting fellow bloggers and get an invaluable exposure to all things  culinary. This includes vendors with new products to savor and get inspiration from. I had no complaints about whatever appliances I had for making traditional Dosa (Traditional South Indian rice & lentil crepes) batter, a sturdy tabletop stone grinder that you could add the Urad dal, turn the timer on , and 30  minutes later, come back to a container full of fluffy, batter with the consistency of whipped egg whites. The The cons of this is the cleaning up, of the various parts, the roller, the grinding bin, the multiple trays on which the rollers need to be placed while transferring the rice & lentil batter, the invariable drips of thick batter on the counter.... you get the point, It takes quite a bit of time. I was pleasantly surprised when the appliance company, Ninja asked me if I'd like to try any of their

Pickling & preserving the Buddha's Hand!

 Got your attention with that sacrilegious sounding title on this post, didn't I? Well, I'm as spiritual as the next person out there, and never in my life will I ever commit that variety of Blasphemy, so nothing to fret about. I still wonder why these curious looking citrus entities (other than the obvious visual reason) were called such. It turns out that these fruits are used as a religious offering to the Buddha. My neighboring Whole Foods Market (which is quite some distance away, in Princeton) had a stock of these weird looking citrus and I must have been the oddball customer who immediately went cuckoo on spotting them. Since I had never seen one before, I immediately went for the biggest fruit with the most tentacles (since they were sold as individual units rather than by weight) The first three 'tentacles' were peeled off for their zest, dried in the oven and went into making a citrus salt for my Food52 Secret Santa .     Making