Banana Sheera
Semolina roasted in ghee and finished with mashed ripe banana — a small sweet box that needs one pan, one banana past its best, and about fifteen minutes.
Drafted — not yet cooked in our kitchen
- Hands on
- 16 min
- Total
- 35 min
- Serves
- 4
- Difficulty
- easy
The sweet corner of a lunch box, made from a banana nobody was going to eat otherwise. Roasting the rava properly in ghee is the whole dish — everything after that is pouring hot water in carefully and stirring.
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Ingredients
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Method
Peel the bananas and mash them with a fork until no lumps are left. Use the ones that have gone spotty and soft — a firm banana stays in pieces and turns the sheera into something a child has to chew through.
Look for: A smooth pulp that falls off the fork in one piece, with no white firm bits showing through.
2–3 min · bowl
Put the water on to boil in a separate pan and leave it there. It has to go into the rava hot — cold liquid meeting roasted rava is what makes sheera lumpy, and no amount of stirring afterwards undoes it.
Look for: A full rolling boil breaking the whole surface, not a lazy simmer at the edges.
4–6 min · high heat · saucepan
Melt most of the ghee in a kadai on medium-low and add the rava. Stir it almost continuously — the grain at the bottom will colour long before the rest if you leave it alone.
Look for: It smells toasted rather than raw and floury, closer to a plain biscuit, and a pinch rubbed between the fingers falls apart into separate grains rather than clumping. The colour barely moves — go by smell, not by looking for brown.
8–12 min · medium-low heat · kadai
Turn the heat down to low and pour the boiling water in a little at a time, stirring hard as it goes. Stand back as you pour — it will spit. Add the sugar and the cardamom once all the water is in.
Look for: The rava drinks the water and the whole thing pulls away from the sides of the kadai in one mass when you push it with the spoon.
4–6 min · low heat · kadai
Take the kadai off the heat, fold the mashed banana through and stir in the last of the ghee. Folding it in off the heat is deliberate — banana cooked hard goes flat and slightly sour, and the point of it here is the fresh smell.
Look for: Evenly pale gold with no streaks of unmixed banana, and glossy rather than dry-looking.
2–3 min · kadai
Leave it in the pan to cool before it goes into a box. Sheera firms up considerably as it cools, which is what makes it packable at all.
Look for: Cool right through, and a spoonful holds its shape on the spoon instead of slumping off.
15–20 min
About this dish
Packing notes for a pre-KG box. Water rather than milk here, deliberately — milk is the first thing to turn in a box that sits out all morning, and it keeps the box dairy-free apart from the ghee. That does not make the sheera keep: cooked semolina is moist and sweet and sits out no better than anything else. Two hours at room temperature, an hour if the day is hot, and a cold pack for a full school morning. No nuts, no raisins. Both are the standard garnish on sheera and both are a choking risk at three and four years old; the dish does not need either. If you want the look, a little grated coconut is safe and goes on after it has cooled.