What is "sutarfeni"

Sutarfeni is an Indian sweet, shredded, flaky - rice-flour roasted in ghee (clarified butter), blended with melted sugar to form a cotton candy, and topped with finely chopped pistachio and almonds. The product is typically flavored with powdered cardamom. It may be white in color, scented with floral essences such as rose water or screwpine, or it may be colored and flavored with saffron.

Sutarpheni is one of the Indian analogues of the Turkish pismaniye, which uses wheat flour instead of rice flour, and the Persian pashmak, which substitutes sesame paste for wheat flour. The choice of rice flour as the source of starch is not critical, and regular white (wheat) flour may be substituted. Sohan papdi is similar except that it uses a mixture of chickpea flour and wheat flour as the starting material instead of rice flour. The original recipe may have been brought to India following the numerous waves of invasions of Northern India by the Islamic rulers of Central Asia and Persia from the 9th through the 18th centuries CE. The threads of pismaniye, however, are considerably finer than those of sutarfeni, because the gluten in wheat flour allows the pastry strands to be thinner without falling apart . The addition of cardamom as a flavoring agent is a typically Indian touch.

Without special equipment to melt the sugar/flour mixture and spin it into threads, making sutarpheni can be laborious and the recipe is unsuitable for preparation at home. (Videos illustrating the manual preparaton show 3-4 people standing around a large pan and pulling the pastry into a circle that is repeatedly folded upon itself.) Alternative recipes start either with shredded filo pastry, which is fried in butter or shortening, or ready—made store-bought fried wheat vermicelli. The psstry is then combined with about half its weight of sugar syrup (made with 2 parts sugar and 1 part water), which is then gradually absorbed by the pastry, so that the final product is dry.