I have some very pungent roses in bloom at the moment, on smelling them my first thought was that they smelled like Turkish Delight. My Second thought that was it should be possible to use them in a pudding of some sort myself.
I have seen rose water in some recipes, is this the only way to use roses in cooking? What is a good way to get the flavor into food?
Rose petals are edible. If you look for rose petal recipes, you will find many creative uses of them, including rice pudding with roses - so your pudding intuition was correct. During colonial American times they were considered a treat. You can candy rose petals with egg whites and sugar - typical cautions about appropriate raw egg white useage applies.
Before using your rose petals in culinary applications, make sure to remember what chemicals you used on them. If they've been sprayed with pesticides, you don't want to be eating them.
If you're making a Persian dish with rice, then add some rose water to the cooking water. The rice then becomes very fragrant. I like it with slightly sweet pork dishes.
This raises the question of how to make rose water from rose petals. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing you could just put them in a (clean!) cloth bag and add that to the water instead.
You can use them to make marmalade, or (with a slightly more complex process), you can perform steam distillation of the petals and extract the essential oils, which you can use as a very pleasant aroma (after dilution) in ice creams and popsicles.
Remember that it's very important to have pesticides-free petals.
as one of the other visitors mentioned, be careful not to use rose petals that have been sprayed with who knows what.
An alternative is to use rose petals (or the green leaves of the rose,for that matter) of organic certified roses from ecuador, check www.nevadoroses.com, or the latest news about edible certified organic roses in this Reuters article
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