Indian Recipes
Coconut Rice Pudding (Kheer)
Rice slowly simmered in milk and coconut milk with cardamom, finished with ghee-fried cashews, raisins and toasted coconut.
- Serves 4
- Cook about 50 min
- Serve warm or chilled
- Indian
Method
Bring the milk to the boil in a heavy-based saucepan, stirring so it does not catch. Drain the rice, lightly crush it with your fingers and add it to the milk.
Simmer gently, uncovered, for 30–40 minutes, stirring every few minutes and scraping the bottom and sides, until the rice is very soft and the milk has reduced by about a third.
Stir in the coconut milk, sugar and crushed cardamom and simmer for 5 more minutes. The pudding thickens as it cools, so take it off the heat while it is still slightly runny.
Heat the ghee in a small pan and fry the cashews until golden, then add the raisins for a few seconds until they plump up. Stir most of them into the kheer.
Serve warm or chilled, topped with the toasted coconut and the remaining cashews and raisins.
Tip: tap a step to tick it off as you cook.
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Chef’s notes
- If you chill it, loosen with a splash of milk before serving.
- Keeps for 2 days in the fridge.
How this recipe was developed
The old Cookeryonline page reproduced a published recipe, so we wrote a new one. We started from the classic North Indian chawal ki kheer and the South Indian pal payasam, then added coconut milk, which gives this version its name.
- Slow reduction. Swasthi Shreekanth uses 50 g of rice and 50–65 g of sugar; Hebbar’s Kitchen cooks a quarter-cup of rice slowly in a lot of milk until creamy.
- Coconut milk. Swasthi notes that coconut milk works in kheer, though it changes the result; we use it for part of the milk to suit the dish’s name.
- Ghee-fried nuts and raisins. Cashews and raisins roasted in ghee and poured over follow Hebbar’s Kitchen.
Sources we compared (ratings as shown on each site on 31 October 2026):
- Swasthi's Recipes (Swasthi Shreekanth): Rice kheer (chawal ki kheer)
- Hebbar's Kitchen (Archana Hebbar): Pal payasam (rice kheer)
This is an original Cookeryonline recipe written in our own words. Ingredient choices and techniques are credited above; no source text has been copied.