Gajar Ka Halwa Recipe - Sweet Carrot Pudding

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Cooking With Anadi

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What Is Gajar Ka Halwa?

Also known as carrot halwa, this is a sweet Indian carrot pudding. Grated carrots are cooked with ghee, then added to a milk and sugar mixture and simmered to make a fantastic pudding. This is the ultimate kid-friendly veggie dessert! This dessert is perfect for holidays such as Diwali, the festival of lights, or at any big gathering such as a wedding or dinner party. Whether there’s a special occasion or not, it can also be served just as a soothing hot dessert in the winter months!

Slow and steady is the trick to mastering this dessert recipe. You need some patience, but the method itself is quite simple! This has been a real delight in my household to switch things up for dessert. I can’t think of a time where I’m more excited to have carrots except for this halwa!

In my household, a couple of desserts were on rotation, and this was one of them. I feel I say this in the other dessert recipes I’ve posted, including Sooji Halwa - which is semolina pudding, very similar to this recipe! - and Rice Kheer - which is Indian rice pudding - but my sister and I would have this whenever we felt like it and my mom. So if we’ve already had sooji halwa, then we’d have carrot halwa for a change. As I’ve said, slow cooking is the key to getting a perfect halwa, so if my mom was impatient, then this wasn’t gonna be on the table! Maybe you won’t have to wait as long as a Ragu alla Bolognese for the carrot halwa to come together, but you will need to set some time aside and plan a little bit to make it!

This is a fabulous dessert to make for dinner parties because you can certainly adapt the ingredient quantities to make it in bulk. However, if you’ve never made this before, I do warn you that the carrots will really shrink up! I used nearly a whole 2 pound batch of carrots and it made four servings!

Ready for an exciting vegetable pudding? Then let’s get to the Gajar Ka Halwa recipe!

Why Make This Indian Carrot Dessert?

This is an excellent dessert to get in your veggies! Carrots are the star of this dessert, and carrots are superb for your health! You may know from Bugs Bunny that carrots help with eye health, but they’re amazing for overall health too! Carrots are loaded with beta carotene that can be converted into vitamin A in your body. Furthermore, carrots also contain potassium, which is a crucial mineral for blood pressure control. For more details on the health benefits of carrots, check out this article by Healthline.

Let’s discuss the other ingredients used for carrot halwa as well. Milk is not only a good source of protein and calcium, but you also have so many other great nutrients from milk, including iron, vitamins E, B-6 and K; and selenium. The calcium from milk assists in bone and dental health, which is especially important for children. This is the vegetable dessert that sure is loved by kids! Finally, studies have shown that drinking milk may help lower the risk of getting type 2 diabetes in adults, as milk proteins assist in improving blood sugar balance.

We’ll be cooking the carrots in ghee, which is clarified butter. Ghee is a saturated fat, but it can help you absorb vitamin A, a fat-soluble vitamin, and can help reduce gut inflammation. Furthermore, ghee is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which can also reduce inflammation and protects against heart disease.

If you’ve never tasted this Indian carrot pudding recipe before, when you take your first bite you’ll notice how creamy and sweet the halwa is without being too heavy. You’ve never experienced carrots like this before! If I had to choose between Sooji Halwa or the carrot halwa, it is a very hard choice, mind you! - but I think I’d prefer carrot halwa! You’ll notice that there are intricate dimensions of this dessert, coming from the texture of the grated carrots in the pudding. The carrots aren’t pureed in there, so you taste the grittiness of the carrots, while you still have that sweetness from the sugar, aroma from the green cardamom and creaminess from the milk! It’s the perfect dessert that’s full of flavors and a great way to get in your carrots! I love everything about it!

Tips for the Best Indian Carrot Pudding

• Don’t grate the carrots too thin, otherwise they will lose any texture in the final dish.
• Cook the halwa slowly for the best texture and creaminess.
• Keep stirring from time to time to prevent the milk from burning.
• Use the brightest, organic carrots you can find for the best tasting halwa
• Customize the sweetness to your own preference. Or make the halwa without any sweetener and top each portion with everyone’s favorite choice of sweetener.

Tools Needed

• Large bowl
• Wok
• Whisk
• Nonstick pan
• Wooden spoon
• Measuring spoons

Ingredients for Gajar Ka Halwa

This recipe has three base ingredients: carrots, milk and sugar. The rest are additional to really enhance our halwa and make it a true delight for your sweet tooth! Let’s go over what we’ll need for this recipe.

• Carrots: The most important ingredient, right! Gajar refers to the carrots! Here we’ll be grating our carrots, then cooking them in ghee. We’ll add our cooked carrots into the milk and sugar mixture, and they’ll be slowly simmered to make our pudding.
• Milk & water: There are many ways to make this carrot halwa. You’ll see some versions with condensed milk solids, known as koya, and I’ll talk about this later on in this post. In this recipe, I’m using 2% dairy milk. You could use milk powder as well, if desired.
• Ghee: Used to cook the carrots.
• Sugar: Sugar makes this pudding sweet. Feel free to substitute sugar with you favorite sweetener, though! You could use maple syrup or honey for natural sweeteners, or even use stevia or Splenda! For simplicity, I used table sugar, and this is the most common sweetener used for this dish.
• Ground green cardamom: I consider ground green cardamom essential for pretty much all Indian desserts! When writing this recipe, I actually couldn’t think of a dessert that doesn’t use ground green cardamom! It just adds an incredible aroma that I find really make this dish complete without!
• Cashews: I’ll be adding some chopped cashews for garnish, but feel free to use almonds or pistachios, or even add some dried fruit such as raisins if you like.

Optionally, you could also add a few strands of saffron along with the milk to add more aromatics to your halwa.

How to Make an Amazing Carrot Pudding Indian Style

Note that the FULL PRINTABLE RECIPE is at the bottom of this post! Keep scrolling to save this for later!

1. Add milk and your sweetener of choice in a large pot or wok and whisk well to combine. Set the pot/wok to medium heat and bring the milk to a simmer.
2. In the meanwhile, heat the ghee in a separate pan/pot and once hot, add the grated carrots. Stir occasionally and cook until the carrots soften and turn sweet, about 8-10 minutes.
3. Once the milk is simmering and the carrots are ready, add the carrots to the milk and mix well.
4. Bring the milk back up to a simmer and then reduce the heat so that the milk has a slow simmer.
5. Slowly cook for at least 1 hour while stirring occasionally until the milk has completely bubbled away.
6. Once the consistency is to your liking, add the ground green cardamom and mix well. Taste and adjust sweetness to your preference.
7. Serve warm or cold, garnished with chopped cashews and/or almonds.

Indian Carrot Pudding Is Not Carrot Cake

If you searched for carrot pudding and landed here, it is worth being clear about what this is and is not, because the English name covers two completely different desserts. There are no eggs in gajar ka halwa, no flour, and it never goes anywhere near the oven. It is not a baked custard, it is not a steamed pudding, and it is certainly not carrot cake with its cream cheese frosting. Every minute of it happens in a pot on the stove.

The spicing is different too. A Western carrot pudding usually leans on cinnamon, nutmeg, mixed spice and a little orange zest. There is no zest here and none of those spices. Gajar ka halwa carries exactly one: half a teaspoon of ground green cardamom, and it goes in right at the end, after the milk has reduced, so the perfume is still there when you eat it rather than cooked away over an hour. Ground white cardamom is a milder stand-in, and half the amount of ground allspice will do at a push, though you lose the floral note that makes the dish.

The carrots are grated, and that matters more than it sounds. You are not making a carrot puree, there is no blending and no food processor involved, and boiling carrots in water would pour the sweetness you are after straight down the sink. Two cups of grated carrot keeps a little texture right through the finished halwa, which is the difference between this and a smooth spoonable pudding. The recipe does not ask you to peel them either.

Milk, Sugar and an Hour of Patience

There is no water anywhere in this recipe. The liquid is two cups of milk and nothing else, sweetened with a quarter cup sugar, and that is the entire base. If you would rather not use refined sugar, three tablespoons of honey gives it a floral edge and three tablespoons of maple syrup gives it an earthier one. The milk and sweetener go into a large pot or wok together and come up to a simmer on medium heat.

Meanwhile the carrots get their own head start: two tablespoons of ghee in a separate pan, then the grated carrot, stirred occasionally for eight to ten minutes until it softens and visibly turns sweeter. Only then do the carrots go into the simmering milk. Cooking them in fat first is what deepens the flavor; tip them into cold milk from raw and the finished halwa tastes thinner.