Falooda Sev – One Ingredient Recipe

Haven’t you at some point felt vexed at not having the necessary ingredients for getting a dish together?  A dish that you’ve been conjuring up in your mind’s eye until it becomes a salivating necessity?  And when you’re all agog to launch your ship of culinary delicacies, you’re stopped short owing to a shortfall of ingredients.  While there’s plenty of sugar in the larder, there is no gelatine, not even a 5 gm sachet in sight.  While there’s sufficient cornflour, there’s no mozzarella. Or for that matter, there isn’t any other variety of cheese either to substitute mozzarella.  Having nothing in your baffle tray can be rather baffling.

It was when I was getting set to put together a Royal Falooda recipe that I realized with dismay that my vermicelli stock – to put it mildly – was depleting.   To be honest, the vermicelli was clean-finished, with just an empty wrapper left in the drawer.  And the ice-cream that I was under the mistaken notion was lying frozen in the fridge, was polished off by somebody a night prior.  Let’s not analyse who it could’ve been that polished off my ice-cream, as knowing that would vex me further.

Well, it isn’t impossible to assemble a falooda without one of the two ingredients, but going without both ingredients was unthinkable.  I mean, you’d get a falooda of sorts, but a “royal” one – never.

As I always maintain, necessity is the mother of invention.  The grey cells – the right side ones – go a-ticking and then snap comes an idea.  How about making your own vermicelli, or more aptly put – your own“falooda sev”.  God, it was smoother than the original stuff if not better.  And if I told you that only just one ingredient went into the sev making process, you’d be shocked.  Shell shocked, unlike ’em macaroni shells.  Hold on and give me a moment before I fill you in with a blueprint if only to substantiate my claim that dishes can indeed be prepared with just one ingredient.

FALOODA SEV RECIPE

Corn flour is the only single ingredient that goes into this "falooda sev" recipe. If you don't count ice cubes and water as part of its ingredients, that is. A single ingredient recipe.

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Prep Time 7 mins

Cook Time 8 mins

Total Time 15 mins

Course Dessert

Cuisine Indian

Ingredients

  

• 1 cup corn flour
• 3 cups water
• 1 tray ice cubes
• 3 cups chilled water
• 1 piping bag with small holed nozzle

Instructions

 

• Take corn flour in a bowl, add water and whisk it with a small hand whisk till it forms a lump-free slurry.
• Heat the slurry in a pan, stirring continuously till thickened. It should be sufficiently thick, almost till a glue-like consistency.
• Pour the gluey cooked mix into a piping bag bearing a nozzle with little holes, taking care to not scald your hands in the process.
• Hold the piping bag over the chilled iced water and squeeze it gently but firmly to ooze out thin strings of the mixture into the water.  Form circular movements with a steady squeeze, so as to allow for a formation of circular strands of “sev”.

  It takes a bit of dexterity to get strands of even thickness; the squeeze pressure makes a difference too apart from the nozzle hole.

  Rest assured that even broader/ flatter strings will do, as eventually, the sev is likely to be hidden from view among several other falooda ingredients in the glass.
• The strands will appear semi-translucent, which is the way falooda sev has to be.

Voila, there goes our one-ingredient recipe!  You have saved the effort of having to make a dash to queue up at the grocers, to pick up that one vermicelli ingredient at a cost at that!  You eventually figure out how to get going your own “vermicelli” or in local terms your own falooda sev recipe!