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The brightly hued sweets at a mithai shop — Barbie-pink spheres of chum chum, silver-glazed diamonds of kaju katli and golden laddoos glistening with ghee — are the stuff of childhood dreams.
They certainly were for Pooja Bavishi, who owns Malai Ice Cream, a scoop shop in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. Growing up, she would make quick work of the boxes of mithai her family would buy in Edison, N.J., where they shopped for Indian ingredients. Mithai was also central to Diwali, which will be celebrated on Oct. 31 this year.
Recipe: Ice Cream Peda
But as her tastes shifted, she realized those treats could be too sweet — and they could use some salt.
“Sweet-on-sweet wasn’t something that was as appealing to me,” Ms. Bavishi said.
To some, the intense, untethered sweetness of mithai, a category of South Asian confections built on nuts, dairy and ghee (and, traditionally, no salt), is precisely the appeal. But for South Asian American cooks who grew up in a world of salted caramel and chocolate-covered pretzels, the mithai they prepare can look and taste quite different: cookies, pie or ice cream, with various ingredients to balance all of that conventional sweetness. And yes, that includes salt.
In her new book, “Malai Cookbook: Frozen Desserts with South Asian Flavors,” Ms. Bavishi makes peda, a sweet of caramelized milk solids, using melted ice cream and a dash of salt. The toasty, nutty essence of the confection is the same, but it is “a little less sweet, a little more nuanced,” she said.
Mithai wasn’t always so saccharine. Until the colonization of India in the 18th century, the country’s sweetener of choice was jaggery, which has a toasty, less cloying flavor, said Arun Kumar Singh, an assistant professor of political science at Multanimal Modi College in Modinagar, India. But a robust cane sugar industry emerged during the colonial era and was subsidized by the government even after India’s independence in 1947. Today, many mithai makers still rely on cane sugar, Dr. Singh said.
When Deepa Shridhar, the chef of the pop-up series Thali Omakase in Austin, Texas, makes pumpkin pie inspired by Mysore pak, a fudgy, chickpea-based sweet, she uses jaggery — and salt.
“I have convinced a lot of aunties that putting a little bit of salt in their Mysore pak is going to make it better,” she said.
Recipe: Badam Burfi Bark
Hetal Vasavada, whose latest cookbook, “Desi Bakes,” includes riffs on well-known South Asian desserts like an almond-based badam burfi bark topped with pink ruby chocolate, said she started modernizing mithai not only to appeal to her evolving taste buds, but also because of the sheer difficulty of making traditional sweets.
“American and European desserts, as long as you are using a scale and following the directions, you should get something that works,” she said. But mithai is much more temperamental. If the nuts aren’t finely ground, the mithai will fall apart, she said. If the nuts are too finely ground, it will turn into a paste and won’t set properly.
Zeeshan Shah, a chef and an owner at Superkhana International, an Indian restaurant in Chicago, remembers his first attempt at making gulab jamun, in which balls of milk solids are deep-fried. “It took three of us to make it happen,” he said. “Each of us was separately so frustrated.”
Modern mithai innovations aren’t exclusive to the diaspora. In India, newer mithai shops might sell chocolate-dipped barfi or peda the flavor of Biscoff cookies. Bombay Sweet Shop in Mumbai crosses bouncy, syrup-soaked rasgulla, with tiramisù.
Ms. Bavishi, of Malai Ice Cream, said she’ll always feel nostalgic for the sugary sweets of her youth, but she has neither easy access to a mithai shop nor the patience to make her favorites. Keeping up these traditions, she said, requires a little creativity.
“Kaju katli doesn’t always have to be a diamond shape in a mithai box,” she said. “It can come in an ice cream pint, and you can get the same feelings out of it.”
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