Calories in Milk Barfi

The recipe cooks 100 g of khoya with 35 g of castor sugar and 2 tablespoons of ghee, sets the mixture and cuts it into 4 pieces. One piece therefore contains 25 g of khoya, 9 g of sugar and one and a half teaspoons of ghee. Size is everything with barfi, and this is a home-cut square. Sweet shops cut their own sizes, often thicker, and sell by weight, so a piece from a box may hold noticeably more khoya than the one measured here. Among the 20 sweets in this set it comes 7th from the lightest, a little above besan barfi at 162 kcal.

Fat supplies 61% of the energy, carbohydrate 30% and protein 10%. Khoya is milk with most of its water boiled away, so it concentrates milk fat and milk protein in a small volume, and this recipe adds ghee as well. That combination explains why a square that disappears in a couple of bites carries 12.2 g of fat. The same khoya brings 4.3 g of protein, which is more than a ladoo of similar energy offers, but barfi is still a concentrated fat-and-sugar food.

A single square of milk barfi is about 8% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 11% of a woman's. Barfi is rarely eaten one at a time from a festival box: two pieces are 356 kcal and three are 534 kcal, with 36.6 g of fat. Because it is small and soft it gives no sense of having eaten much. A workable habit is to take one piece with tea, sit down with it, and put the box away. Half a piece, about 89 kcal, is a fair share when several sweets are being tasted.

For its size, milk barfi is high in fat: 12.2 g in one piece, all of it milk fat from khoya and ghee, with 13.3 g of sugars. The sugars figure counts the milk sugar in khoya as well as the 9 g added. A shop piece may be larger than the one described. Anyone advised by a doctor or dietitian to limit saturated fat or sugar, for raised cholesterol or diabetes, should go by that advice on how many pieces, if any, fit their plan.