What is Meethe Chawal?
Meethe chawal is a sweet rice pilaf speckled with fruit and nuts. This is my mom’s signature dessert – she makes this sweet dish for almost every special occasion and has done so for as long as I can remember. Everyone who tries her meethe chawal raves about it so I’m sure you’ll love this dessert! Today I’m sharing my mom’s famous meethe chawal recipe – adapted for the instant pot making it even easier to make! My family’s recipe calls for spices like floral green cardamom, smoky black cardamom, sweet cinnamon, and fragrant cloves and saffron. It also calls for pineapple, shredded coconut, raisins, and nuts. You can easily make different variations of this rice: try garnishing it with sweet (canned) mandarin! Or use different nuts! I prefer pistachios for both the flavor and the pop of color it adds to this rice but cashews or sliced almonds work great too!
A Dessert with Two Names: Meethe Chawal & Zarda Pulao
This sweet rice dish is known by two names: in Hindi this dish is called meethe chawal which means “sweet rice” and in Urdu this dish is called zarda pulao which means “yellow rice.” Typically yellow food coloring is added to this dessert to give the dish a brighter yellow hue so feel free to add that if you’d like. I prefer making this without food dye and so my rice only has a faint yellow hue thanks to the saffron. This sweet pulao is a recipe straight out of my cookbook, Indian Food Under Pressure. One of my blog readers left me a book review on amazon and this is how she described this dish: “The rice dessert smells like Christmas and tastes like love.” I love that description so much because this really is a special occasion dessert that tastes like love. I hope you make and love this festive and fragrant sweet rice pilaf! Like this recipe? Pin it to your favorite Pinterest board now so you will remember to make it later!
