Aam Panna
Raw mangoes cooked soft, pulped and spiced with roasted cumin and black salt, then diluted cold — sour first, sweet a long way behind.
Drafted — not yet cooked in our kitchen
- Hands on
- 17 min
- Total
- 1 hr 37 min
- Serves
- 4
- Difficulty
- easy
Panna is a concentrate, not a juice. Get the sourness and salt right while it is thick in the bowl, and the glass takes care of itself.
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Ingredients
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Method
Put the whole raw mangoes in the cooker with 200 ml water. Two whistles on high, then take it off and let the pressure fall by itself. Cooking them whole and unpeeled keeps the flesh from turning watery.
Look for: The skin wrinkles and lifts away at a touch, and the flesh under it gives completely when pressed with a spoon.
20–24 min · high heat · pressure cooker
Let them cool until you can hold one, then peel and squeeze all the pulp off the stone with your fingers, working over the bowl. Scrape the skins too — a good deal of pulp clings to the inside.
Look for: A smooth pale-green pulp with no fibre or skin in it. Roughly 250 g from two mangoes, though it varies with the variety.
15–20 min · bowl
Dry-roast the cumin seeds in a small pan on medium, shaking constantly, then tip them onto a plate to cool and crush them coarsely. Do this now rather than reaching for the ready powder — the difference between freshly roasted cumin and the jar is most of this drink.
Look for: They darken a shade or two, crackle, and smell sharply toasted. Once they start smoking they are burnt and will taste of ash.
1.5–2.5 min · medium heat · saucepan
Whisk the pulp with the sugar, black salt, roasted cumin, salt and pepper until the sugar has gone. Taste it as a concentrate — it should be aggressively sour and salty at this stage, because everything gets four times gentler once the water goes in.
Look for: A smooth, thick, spoon-coating concentrate with no grittiness of undissolved sugar when you rub a drop between your fingers.
· bowl
Press the concentrate through a sieve if you want it clean, then chill it. It thickens in the fridge and the spicing settles and deepens over a few hours — it is better on day two than on day one.
Look for: Cold through, and thick enough to fall off a spoon in a slow ribbon.
60–240 min · bowl
Three tablespoons of concentrate to a glass of cold water, stirred, with ice and a few mint leaves crushed between your palms and dropped in. Adjust the first glass and pour the rest to match.
Look for: Pale green, cloudy, and sour enough to make you blink before the sweetness arrives. If it tastes flat, it needs salt rather than sugar.
About this dish
The concentrate keeps a week in the fridge and freezes well in an ice tray — two cubes to a glass of water. That is the version worth making, since raw mangoes are only around for a couple of months. Roasting the mangoes whole over a flame or in a hot oven until the skin blackens gives a smokier panna, which is how it was made before pressure cookers. It takes 25 to 30 minutes and is worth doing once to know the difference. Some households add a pinch of dry ginger powder or a little jaggery in place of half the sugar. Both change the drink noticeably, so make it plain the first time.