Desi Rose Syrup & Gulkand

This post is step 1 of the process of preparing ingredients for falooda. Step 2 will be to make a rose-flavored ice cream. The remainder of the steps, including the process to make a naturally colored pink falooda sev and the process of assembling the drink, will appear in a post dedicated to the falooda itself, though this scented rose syrup is something to enjoy just for itself, too, even if you never get to the falooda!

Genie in a bottle is what this recipe is for. How else would you be able to capture the fragrance of a good paneer rose–பன்னீர் ரோஜா–desi gulab [Gruß an Teplitz] and the richness of its color in one go?

Most rose waters out there are clear liquids which have distilled essences, and we love the splash of those as we enter wedding halls for their celebratory, cooling, and refreshing feel. But most edible rose syrups out there, including the famous rooh afza, which isn’t just rose but is also rose, are rather unbelievably red. Rooh afza was created at the turn of the 20th century to be a nerve-soothing, body-cooling formulation. It used a dozen or more floral, fruit, and vegetable extracts. If it also made use of artificial color at the time, perhaps that was forgivable given its other virtues, but I’m not sure the rooh afza marketed commercially now can claim to be much more than a hyper-red hyper-sweet and hyper-artificial squash. Bludgeon me and sugar-high lay me down sort of sweetness. Not for me.

I stumbled on an alternative while making this gulkand ice cream cake. My gulkand supply was fast getting over, I was determined to keep open the possibility of more cakes by making gulkand myself. With the right edible roses, gulkand is easy enough: sugar, rose petals, and a little honey, all left to sun-cook until the petals have softened and the sugars have reduced to a jammy consistency.

Except perhaps there was water on my rose petals. I don’t trust what I get in the markets to be chemical-spray-free, so washing is my only route to using them culinarily. And when one jar started to ferment a little: okay, I thought, and decanted the liquid, found it quite marvelous, and then never looked back. After decanting, the drier-by-far petals with more sugar and honey added and the jar were left to sun-cook and became my gulkand, and the bottle of decanted liquid confirmed that I could make a rose syrup that was both the scent and the color of roses without a single additive.

The hardest part of this recipe is finding the right roses. Ideally, you need paneer roses or some other red-to-dark-pink variety, a combination of the right fragrance (the stronger the better) and the right color (the darker the better). Lighter pink roses wouldn’t give you enough color and may turn a syrup brown, otherwise tea roses would work beautifully for their fragrance. Bouquet roses may be the right color, but they won’t have the scent to make your efforts worthwhile. If you grow your own paneer roses or (even better) Damask roses [rosa damascena], collecting the blossoms as they appear and adding them to a jar with sugar works until you have enough. And that’s a rationale for a rose bush if I ever had one.

There’s controversy about which, exactly, is the paneer rose. The market vendors insist that it’s the gulabi pink rose you see in most of the images in this post, but the ladies at home insist just as forcefully that paneer rose is pink, with a blossom that lasts barely a day and petals that fall very easily off once the bloom is spent. Plus that the real paneer rose smells more beautiful than anything you could get in the local flower markets. The two roses pictured above are the essence of this controversy, the dark pink blossoms from a neighbor’s garden (on the left; looks a bit like damask roses, could pass for what we get in local markets) and the light pink one from a bush I found at a nursery (on the right). Sadly for me, the light pink one had none of the fabled fragrance at all, so I was left working with what I could find in the flower market. Really, it wasn’t bad at all.

Once the right roses are found, it gets simpler. Then it’s a matter of cleaning the flowers, separating petals and layering them in jars with sugar, adding a little honey and then water to encourage fermentation (which softens the petals some) and patiently waiting for the syrup to emerge.

It takes about a week or longer even, and some sugars will break down as a result of fermentation, but in the end you have a gulkand that can live on your counter for as long as it takes for you to use the jar up, and a syrup that will never be enough if you start making rose milk [which will never be that commercial bright pink but will taste mighty fine], paneer sodas [ice, rose syrup, topped with soda water] or falooda, as I did.

Things to make with Rose Syrup & Gulkand

1. Paneer Soda.

Goli soda bottles of paneer soda are available commercially and are better than any Coke if you must go that route. But the home made version is better–less sweet, not artificially colored or scented, and every bit as wonderful, maybe more so. All it takes is a little rose syrup, ice, and chilled soda.

2. Rose Milk

This rose milk will not turn pink but it will smell and taste like real roses and it will be a refreshing, body-cooling sensory delight. Kids will love it. Add some bloomed badam pisini (gum acacia/ gum tragacanth/ gond katira) to make it extra nutritious and cooling.  

3. Bake a Cake!

There’s always the Cardamom Rose Cake (use gulkand instead of rose petals) and the Paan-Gulkand Ice Cream Cake, for when you’re looking for that extra special dessert.

4. Make Paan

When a friend spoke once of using gulkand, betel leaves, and just roasted saunf/fennel seeds as an after-meal digestive, the idea stuck and has become a quick after-food sweet treat. Betel leaves are easy to grow from cuttings, so if you have a pot and some filtered sunshine, you really have no excuses left.

5. Make falooda!

Stories, methods, tips and tricks to make this classic layered summer sharbat coming soon are now up in this post.

6. Mix into other drinks

The cocktailing possibilities of gulkand are endless. Here I’ve added a little syrup to ice, and spooned some fermented amaltas [Cassia fistula, konnapoo] petals over top. Their sourness balances the gulkand’s sweetness perfectly. A longer, better amaltas post will come at some point, too.

Desi rose syrup & gulkand

This is a recipe for making a naturally colored, naturally fragrant rose syrup, and then using the left-over petals to turn into gulkand or a rose petal jam. This is not the traditional method of making gulkand, but it results in a syrup that is intensely redolent, slightly fermented, and an equally fragrant gulkand that can be stored almost indefinitely and used as an ingredient in cakes, in paan, and, topped with soda, in fizzy summer coolers.

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Equipment

• 1 quart jar

Ingredients

  

• 1 generous handful of good quality organic, fragrant red-pink rose petals

For the syrup

• 4-5 tablespoons of sugar to start + 1 cup
• 1/3 cup of honey
• 1-2 cups of water

For the gulkand

• 2-3 tablespoons sugar
• 1/3 cup honey

Instructions

 

• Note that the proportions given here are very rough—a few more rose petals or a little more or less sugar and it will all still work out roughly the same. So, be flexible while making this and be ready to innovate mid-stream.
• Note also that the quart jar is bigger than what is needed for a handful of rose petals, but better a larger jar than a smaller one for this preparation.
• Make sure the rose petals are well washed. Use a salad spinner to remove as much of the water as possible, then spread on a tea-towel and pat dry.
• Using a regular sized jam jar or equivalent, start layering the rose petals with sugar, sprinkling some sugar over each layer of rose petals added and gently packing them into the jar.
• Once the jar is full, pour the honey over the top.
• Cap the bottle and leave this to sit on a counter in a warm spot (filtered sun is ok) for a day, after which the rose petals will start to collapse and reduce in volume. Open and mix the petals and sugar with a clean, dry spoon.
• Add enough water at this stage just barely to submerge the petals (leave a good 1” headspace or more from the top of the jar). The petals will eventually float and the water will be below, and you will start to see the color seep down.
• Close the jar and mix daily until the water below starts to darken in color. At this point (about 3-4 days in), add 1/2 cup sugar–and another 2 days later, add the remaining 1/2 cup. Sugar will feed any microbes doing their fermenting thing, so make sure you don't cap the jar too tightly. You're burping it anyway when you mix daily.
• The syrup is ready when it’s a dark pink-red and very fragrant. It should be mostly ready by the time of the second sugar addition. Taste it – if it feels right after about a week, or a day or so after the second sugar addition, then decant the liquid. If it’s not yet ready, leave it out a day or two longer, continuing to mix periodically, and when it feels ready, decant.
• Bear in mind that this is a fermentation process, so if you see signs of things going wrong–mold growing or just a smell that isn't right–discard and start over. I've not had this happen, but it can. So be vigilant.
• The syrup may be less sweet or less thick than you like at the decanting stage; that’s completely fine. It makes a nice drink on its own, or with ice and a splash of soda.
• If you wish to sweeten it further, simply add more sugar (a 1:1 sugar to liquid ratio makes a simple syrup and there’s already sugar in your mix so this would be at least a rich syrup or a thicker syrup, which is equally desirable). Do NOT heat the syrup to dissolve any additional sugar as that will ruin the fragrance. Add the sugar directly and stir as long as it takes to dissolve, or make a sugar syrup separately, allow it to cool, and add it to the rose colored bottle.
• Transfer the syrup to a clean bottle and store in the refrigerator. The syrup can be stored outside on the counter, too, but bear in mind it’s a product of some fermentation and that’s likely to continue apace if it’s not refrigerated. That’s not a bad thing; the syrup makes for a nice drink when it’s slightly fizzy, too!

For the Gulkand

• Once the syrup is made and bottled, transfer the rose petals to the jar of a food processor and pulse a few times until they are roughly chopped.
• Add the extra sugar and honey, and mix well. Transfer back into the glass quart jar, making sure there’s always an inch or more of headspace.
• Leave this on the counter—indefinitely. The petals will darken considerably. When they have have become soft and lost some of their chewiness, they are ready to use in paan, in cakes (or on them), mixed in with rose syrup and soda, and any other uses you can think of.