Rasgulla

Slip a spoon into the round white sweet and sweet syrup seeps out of the dough, which is made from curdled milk. Rasgulla is a sweet made by kneading chhena (milk curdled with acid), rolling it into balls and cooking them in sugar syrup. A spongy springiness and high moisture content are its hallmarks, but Odisha’s Rasagola ranges from cream-colored to brown. Color, springiness and the condition of the syrup vary from place to place.

Keeping Chhena from Becoming a Hard Cheese

Chhena is made by adding acid to heated milk so that its proteins coagulate, then draining off the whey through cloth. It is a soft dairy product that still holds moisture and is used without ripening. Firmness and water-holding capacity vary even among ingredients that share this name. They depend on the type of milk, the strength of the acid, the coagulation temperature and how the whey is drained.

Rasgulla requires chhena that does not crack when rolled and can absorb syrup after cooking. Cow’s milk generally makes it easier to get chhena with a soft texture. Buffalo milk tends to make chhena harder and coarser, so the method has to be adjusted. Fat content also affects the result. With too little milk fat the chhena turns hard, and with too much the fat seeps out during kneading and the dough becomes sticky. The state of the water, milk fat and milk proteins all bears on the softness.

The chhena is kneaded until smooth and shaped into round balls with no cracks on the surface. Some methods add a small amount of semolina or wheat flour to adjust the dough. The aim is to build a structure based mainly on milk protein and to heat it in syrup while keeping that structure intact.

The Syrup for Cooking and the Syrup for Soaking

The concentration of the syrup does more than adjust the sweetness. It is also one of the production conditions. In one example given in technical materials, the rolled dough is cooked in a heavy syrup and then moved to a thinner syrup to soak. Water evaporates during cooking, so water is added to keep the concentration steady. The condition of the liquid is adjusted for the cooking stage and again for the stage in which the balls take up syrup.

The dough swells as it heats, so the pot needs room for the balls to move. In chhena, milk proteins are packed relatively densely. Even so, samples cooked in syrup have been observed to change into a porous structure with large voids. This structure is one reason the finished rasgulla is soaked with syrup to the center and stays springy. Rasgulla also differs from gulab jamun, whose core of reduced milk is fried and then soaked in syrup, in the step that solidifies the milk and in the method of heating.

Confectioners’ Experiments and the Names of Sweets in Texts

The Kolkata confectioner Nobin Chandra Das and the year 1868 come up again and again in histories of Bengal’s white, springy rosogolla. According to the Das family, this sweet was the result of many attempts to keep balls of chhena from falling apart when cooked in syrup. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the Mullick family of Bhowanipore, Chittaranjan Mistanna Bhandar of Shovabazar and others also kept refining the sweet, each toward its own texture. In 1930, K.C. Das launched canned rasgulla, which made it easier for this perishable milk sweet to reach places beyond Kolkata.

There is also a story about an earlier sweet. It concerns Haradhan Moira, who made sweets in Phulia for the Pal Chowdhury family of Ranaghat. In this tale of accidental discovery, balls of chhena fell into boiling syrup and a sweet was born. A 2021 review by the food researcher Sarkar and colleagues also takes up these lineages of confectioners. Refining the white, spongy sweet took experiments by several confectioners and shops, not only by one famous shop.

On the Odisha side, there is a textual argument that the name rasagola appears in the Dandi Ramayana, written in the 15th–16th century by the poet Balaram Das. Sarkar and colleagues cite a literary anthology published in 1921, where the name appears in one scene. Rama’s younger brothers Bharata and Shatrughna are searching for him. On their journey they visit the sage Bharadvaja, who hosts them with milk sweets and other foods. This is an example of a sweet’s name appearing at a meal in literature. The scene does not describe production steps in enough detail to reproduce today’s way of handling chhena and syrup.

From an Offering to the Gods to Roadside Shops and Boxed Products

In Odisha, rasagola is closely tied to the rituals of the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Each year after the Ratha Jatra, the sweet is offered to the goddess Lakshmi at Niladri Bije, when Lord Jagannath returns. According to tradition, the goddess was unable to go on the journey with him, so she refuses to let the returning god enter. She is won back when he gives her rasagola. In this story, the rasagola the god gives the goddess serves as an offering of reconciliation. It is a story of faith and is different in nature from a production record that would show when the sweet was invented.

Rasagola shops are clustered in Pahala, which lies along the road linking Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. A 2019 account of a visit there records one shop’s method. The shop combines chhena with semolina and cardamom, rolls the mixture into balls and cooks them in a heavy syrup. Some rasagola are made with sugar syrup and some with jaggery syrup, and their sizes also vary, so Odisha’s sweet cannot be described by just one color or firmness.

In Salepur, near Cuttack, the shop of Bikalananda Kar is widely known. In a 2025 interview, his granddaughter said that he started selling handmade rasagola from a hut around 1924–25. The business began by traveling to village festivals and markets. In the next generation it grew to include mechanization and packaging. A separate interview from 2017 describes trial and error in adjusting the syrup and the chewiness to make a product that could be stored and transported. Even in the same shop, a milk sweet eaten fresh at the storefront and one sent to distant places needed different finishes.

Under the geographical indication (GI) system as well, “Banglar Rasogolla” (2017) and “Odisha Rasagola” (2019) were registered under separate names. Odisha’s registration number is 612. The characteristics of each product bearing its regional name are protected separately. The Odisha version differs in color because the sugar is heated, and it also differs from the white Bengal version in softness and in the condition of its syrup.

Glossary