Pedha is a traditional sweet dish of India. It is basically prepared with milk, sugar and then flavoured with cardamom, saffron or dry fruits. Few Indian cities are renowned for their local variety of pedha’s like Mathura, Dharwad and Satara. They have authentic taste – semi soft fudge like texture with solid milky and subtle sweetness. In this post, I am going to share the recipe of my favourite pedha ie, ‘Kandi Pedha‘. They are popular in Satara (city in Maharashtra, India) and sometimes also known as ‘Satara Kandi Pedha‘.

You need 2 main ingredients (Milk & Sugar) for this recipe and lots n’ lots of patience :). We are using full fat milk to make these pedha’s. Use either cow or buffalo milk both will give good results with slight change in colour. I have used cow milk for the recipe, so pedha turns out light brown in colour. The entire process is gradual, patiently boil the milk on low heat while stirring continuously until milk completely solidifies. It is lengthy process but end results are worth the efforts. So without any further ado, let’s see recipe below.

Ingredients:

2 Litre full fat milk

1/3 cup sugar

2 tsp cardamom powder

(proportion for around 18 medium pedha’s)

Method:

Pout the milk into thick bottom pan. Switch on the medium heat and allow milk to boil.

Once milk starts boiling, keep stirring to ensure it won’t sticks to the bottom of pan. We need to keep boiling this milk until liquid completely evaporates to solid form.

Keep stirring patiently and do not allow it to spill outside or stick to bottom of the pan. Also, boil it on medium-low heat else it might burn due to high temperature.

It took me almost 3 hours to solidify 2 litres of full fat cow milk.

As milk starts to solidify, quantity will reduce and it changes colour from white to light brown.

When milk is almost solidified to soft dough, add sugar into it. Mix everything together.

Once sugar is added, it starts melting and softens the solidified milk dough.

Continue further heating on medium-low heat until it solidified again.

Finally, add cardamom powder and gently mix with the dough. Switch off the heat and let the dough cool down.

Be careful and do not overcook it else it will ruin the taste. As soon as milk solidified, switch off the heat and allow it to cool down.

Once dough is completely cooled down, gently knead it for soft, even texture. Roll it into small balls to make pedha . If you have any mould you can shape it or use pedha stamping moulds. I like to keep it round with small thumb press which is ideal for ‘Kandi Pedha‘. Sometimes, I also like to garnish with few pistachio but its totally optional.

Our Kandi Pedha are ready for celebrations!! They are soft, milky yet pleasantly sweet & super delicious 😍

In case, you are short on time, try these pedha with readymade khoya or mawa if its available to you. Heat the khoya on medium heat and solidify it further with sugar. Add cardamom and roll into balls.

Kandhi pedha can be prepared using khoya/mawa but taste won’t be authentic and it will be completely dependent on quality of khoya. In UK, I couldn’t find khoya so I always prepared my batch of pedha using full fat milk and never disappointed.

I hope you enjoyed this recipe would love to try it. If you have any questions or feedback for me, I am all ears 🙂

Thanks for reading my blog !!!

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Recipe