Karachi Sweet Mart MG Road is one of our favorite Mithai shop in Pune. We generally visit Karachi sweet mart MG Road on the day we land to pick up mithai for us to enjoy while it is really fresh and then on the last day of our trip to bring some mithai over to last us at-least for a few days after we are back in Madison. For those uninitiated to mithai, they are confectioneries made by reducing nut powder, nut pastes with sugar and or milk till milk solids and sugar transform to give them a soft but shape holding structure. They are many times adorned with silver paper. The good shops are always filled with a lot of variety of mithai trays, arranged aesthetically filling huge glass cases much like a jeweler. Since India is full of diverse mithai influences many times these shops will feature mithai’s from various states and cultures in India.
The busy shops are great because the mithai keeps turning over and you can witness fresh trays usually from nearby kitchens trickling in as the earlier trays of mithai are sold. Karachi Sweet Mart is someone from our experience we trust to source fresh mithai and they have been around doing this for more than 6 decades.
Although i have been going to Karachi Sweet Mart MG Road for the bengali mithai and the kaju mithai, this time i went there based on a tip by Manisha and our friend Hirinder. During diwali time lot of businesses gift holiday gift boxes to their colleagues and customers and associates. My dad used to get some as well. These came with assortment of fruits and nuts and of-course mithai. Once this box came with a sev mithai. For me as a kid this was something completely new. In my life around that time i had only been familiar with savory sev which is chickpea flour batter extruded into thin vermicelli shapes then fried and salted. Yet this was a sweet made with sev. Turns out this is made with unsalted sev. I tried it as a kid and instantly fell in love with it. However after a few years i never could spot it in mithai stores close to us, i never for some reason felt like checking it out at Karachi. I learned later it is also called singhar mithai and is of sindhi origin as well is not ubiquitously available. More so, a well made one is rare. I had even tried to see if any sweet shops in bigger cities like chicago might have it but without much luck. It is best had fresh and has a fairly short shelf life so ordering it from india does not work either. There’s a delicious little post here agreeing with our sentiments about how it can be one of the most delicious things one can discover during Diwali and features some mouthwatering “making-of” pictures and a home-style recipe by Neelam auntie. If you cannot source Sev Barfi you can always make it using this recipe by Alka of the Sindhirasoi blog which carries a treasure trove of Sindhi recipes. Hilda’s touch of spice blog also carries the recipe with a wonderful picture. So, when Hirinder and Manisha vouched that Karachi Sweet Mart MG Road branch carried really good sev barfi i trusted them and went to pick it up.
It was everything i had hoped for and more, just a perfect product. It was not hard like say mysore pak, but delicate: you could not hold a piece in hand casually without squeezing the barfi shape. It had all the flavor from ghee and a bit of cardamom but it did not leave a greasy mouth-feel. It was nutty with the distinct roasted fragrance and flavor that the besan in the sev brings. It had a perfect mousse like quality when you ate it with spoon, yet each and every strand of sev was intact and not mushed up to form sev puree or besan barfi – – the texture was indeed perfect. The color was gorgeous golden yellow and the garnish of pistachios just the minimum required to enhance the appearance and taste.
You can also make a mithai box using a variety of Mithais. Our picks are the cashew toast which is dry fruits sandwiched between two layers of cashew mithai. The dry fruits are bound with gulkand (rose petal jam). The gulkand adds a bright fragrant taste as you chew into the nutty mithai and is a good change if you are looking for something different than the diamond shaped kaju katli’s. The other one is something similar which is green in color called paan and has a hint of mint. Below is a box with Kaju Ladoo, Dry fruit Paan made with pistachio coating, anjeer katli, and the dry fruit toast with cashew barfi coating.
The other things we tried which are also good are boondi ladoo and bengali champakali.
There is a very talented young gentleman named Mahesh who man’s the counter of Karachi Sweet Mart MG road branch who very patiently and enthusiastically helps you order and then expertly packs mithai’s according to your preference if you are taking them away. He would stack the mixture of mithais we generally order in a box very neatly, then wrap the box with printed paper followed by plastic bag which is tucked in tight and then everything is sealed neatly in tape for travel. He does this swiftly with precision and a smile. If you do go here definitely ask for him to help you and tell him you do appreciate his honest hard work.
