Rosogolla squeezed out, Bengal govt plans radical remix

West Bengal Minister for Food Processing Sailen Sarker was very clear about the direction the brand new rosogolla has to take: ‘‘We want to compete with chocolate bars and toffees. Our targetted clientele will be youngsters and children. If we can have variants of the product, the state’s sweetmeat industry will get a boost.’’ One of the menu options: choco-rosogollas.

Blessed by a grant from the government, the university’s Department of Food Technology and Bio-Chemical Engineering hopes to roll out the first of the reinvented rosogollas in six months. The researchers have been working away for the past year. ‘‘We have defined the basic chemistry behind the making of a rosogolla and we’ve been able to devise a more scientific and hygienic way of extracting cottage cheese, the raw material that makes rosogollas out of milk. This is the first step towards making the sweet more durable and nutritional,’’ Utpal Raychaudhuri of the department told The Indian Express.

The new rosogolla will be more nutritious, more durable and may even taste different, promised the researchers. And there’s also something in it for the health conscious rosogolla junkie too: Runu Chakrabarty, head of the Department of Food Technology, said that the raw material for rosogolla contains casein, which helps prevent colon cancer, arrests cholesterol and provides immunity. ‘‘We are working on modifying the cottage cheese so that we can create rosogollas with therapeutic value,’’ Chakrabarty added.

One man is credited with inventing Bengal’s favourite sweet in 1868: Nabin Chandra Das. He also invented the ‘diabetic rosogolla’ for those unfortunate rosogolla lovers with diabetes and the tinned rosoglla, which helped many a migrant Bengali overcome the distance from home. But his descendants, who run K C Das Pvt Limited today, warn that experiments like the choco-rosogolla may not make it out of the kitchen.

Company director Dhiman Das said their research and development wing at Bangalore had already experimented with chocolate coated rosogolla, but it was an option too expensive to be marketed. Undeterred, the laboratory is now working on vitamin-enriched rosogollas.