My nani makes all her sherbet concentrates at home from scratch, and the few that I’m fond of are pineapple, rose and this jasmine one right here. The beauty of this recipe is that it opens your eyes to just how impure the sugar we buy from the Kirana shops really is as you spoon out the scum that floats on top.

You'll need

Jasmine flowers 250g, ask for Tapasra in local Mumbai stores, which means the jasmine flowers are still attached to their green stems. Keep refrigerated till you start on the sherbet.

Sugar 750g
Milk 1 tsp
Elaichi powder 1/2 tsp
Raspberry red liquid food colour (I prefer Viola)Start by separating the jasmine flowers from their green buds. Take a large heavy bottomed vessel and add the sugar and 500 ml of water to it with the teaspoonful of milk. Boil the sugar over high heat till frothy bits of the sugar’s scum starts to surface. You’ll need to keep fishing this scum out as the sugar boils until there aren’t any more bits of scum left. Add the cardamom powder to the sugar syrup and let it boil for a minute more. Add the cleaned jasmine flowers to the sugar syrup, turn the heat down to low and let the flowers sit int he sugar syrup for 10 minutes undisturbed. Take a peek after 10 minutes to see if the flowers have lost their pearly white look and are looking greenish. Turn off the heat and leave the vessel covered overnight with the jasmine flowers inside. The next day, strain the flowers out of the sugar syrup using a muslin cloth and add the raspberry red colour to tint it a deep ruby red. Go by eye. Decant it into a bottle and add to ice or to milk, just as you would regular sherbet.



This is one of six dishes from A Sindhi summer maani. Ankiet Gulabani of Belly Over Mind dishes details about this exclusive menu for Nicobar here. Find him on Instagram here, or head to his website here.