KO EN ES PT FR Turkish Dessert⏱ 60 minEdit history

Kazandibi (Milk Pudding with a Deliberately Burnt Base)

Name: Kazandibi (Milk Pudding with a Deliberately Burnt Base)
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 1 h
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: Turkish
Ingredients: 1 L whole milk; 150 g sugar; 50 g rice flour; 30 g cornflour; 100 g chicken breast; 0.5 g mastic; 1 tsp vanilla extract; 20 g butter; 3 tbsp sugar; ground cinnamon

An Ottoman palace dessert: milk thickened with rice flour, poured into a buttered, sugared tray and set over a flame until the base burns dark on purpose. Chilled, cut and rolled so the burnt side faces out. The name means "bottom of the cauldron".

Steps

If using chicken, poach the breast, cool it and tear it by hand into very fine threads. Rinse in cold water and squeeze dry.
⏲ 15 min
Whisk the rice flour and cornflour into 200ml of the milk. Warm the rest of the milk with the sugar in a heavy-based pot.
Once the milk steams, pour in the starch mixture, stirring all the time, and add the chicken threads. Keep scraping the base until the pudding is thick enough to hold the mark of a spoon.
⏲ 15 min
Off the heat, stir in the mastic or vanilla.
Butter a metal tray that can go over a flame (about 20x30cm) and sprinkle the sugar evenly over it. Pour in the pudding and level the top.
Set the tray directly over a gas flame and move it a little at a time until the whole base has burnt. When dark brown bubbles rise at the edge and you can just smell burning, move on to the next patch.
⏲ 8 min
Cool to room temperature, then chill for at least 4 hours.
⏲ 240 min
Cut into pieces about 8x5cm, lift each with its base on a spatula and roll it in half so the burnt side faces out. Dust with cinnamon and serve cold.

Variations

Without chicken. Most kazandibi today leaves the chicken out and starts from muhallebi, a plain milk pudding.
Tavuk göğsü. The same chicken pudding served unburnt is tavuk göğsü.
In the oven. Without a gas flame, burn the base on the lowest shelf of a hot oven. It takes longer.
Mastic. As with lokum, it brings chew as well as scent. Too much and it tastes of resin.

Tips

Burn it after the pudding is made. While it cooks, stir so nothing catches.
Use a metal tray. Glass or ceramic cannot go over a flame.
Lay down sugar first. It browns the base evenly.
Keep moving the tray. Left in one place it burns through.
Cut only once it is fully set. Underset, it splits when rolled.
Tear the chicken very fine. Chewy lumps mean it has failed.

More detail and the reasons why (2)

It does on purpose what other milk sweets avoid. Brunost warns that whey caught on the base cannot be rescued, and brigadeiro that a spoon that stops moving is a scorch (dairy and heat). Kazandibi takes that catching out of the cooking and makes it a last, separate step. The pudding has already thickened, and the burning happens only on a buttered, sugared tray, so the bitterness stays in the one layer on the base instead of spreading through the pot.
The chicken was there to thicken. English Wikipedia notes that the traditional chicken was used as a thickener. Breast boiled and torn into very fine fibres spreads through the milk and adds body. Where crème brûlée burns the top, this burns the bottom and turns it over.