Featured recipe

Kancha golla

Fresh cheese balls with cardamom

Natore, a quiet district town north of the Padma, is known throughout Bangladesh for one sweet, and a visit there is incomplete without a clay pot of kanchagolla to carry home. Kancha means raw, and the name is a joke at the sweet's expense: unlike rasgulla or chomchom, it is never boiled in syrup but simply kneaded fresh chhana with sugar, warmed in a pan for a few minutes and rolled into soft balls scented with cardamom. The texture is moist and faintly grainy, the taste milky and gently sweet, best eaten within a day or two. Cooking the mixture too long is what most home cooks get wrong; it turns dry and crumbly, more like sandesh. Chef's tip: make the chhana from full-fat milk and squeeze it only lightly, so plenty of moisture stays in for that melting Natore texture.

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