Rose petal jam substitutes

The standard answer, and a genuinely good one: the jam supplies the sweetness and body, the rose water supplies the whole point.

Best for

pastry and baklava fillings, swirling into ice cream or yogurt, layer cakes and thumbprint cookies

Choose a pale, low-acid jam and stir the rose water in cold. Apricot and quince disappear best behind the rose; strawberry and raspberry read clearly as themselves, so you get strawberry-and-rose rather than rose. You lose the soft petal threads and the jam's own fruit sits underneath.

Perfume and sweetness with nothing holding them up.

Best for

drizzling over ice cream, rice pudding or pancakes, brushing over warm pastry, soaking syrup for cakes

Much thinner, so it soaks in and runs rather than sitting where you put it. Fine anywhere the jam was going to melt anyway, wrong as a filling that has to stay in place inside a folded pastry.

Rose lokum is essentially rose, sugar and starch, so melting it back down gets you most of the way there.

Best for

pastry and cookie fillings, stirring into hot milk puddings, when a Turkish grocer has lokum but no receli

Chop it and warm it with a splash of water until it slumps into a thick paste. It is stickier and more gelled than jam and it firms up considerably as it cools, so use it warm and expect a chewier bite. Dust the sugar off the cubes first or the result is cloying.

The option that gets the pink colour as well as the perfume.

Best for

anything where the filling shows, ice cream ripples and buttercream, Persian and Balkan desserts

Both are tarter than rose petal jam, so pull back on any other acid in the recipe and go a little heavier on the rose water to stop the fruit dominating. The result is brighter and sharper than the real thing, which sits closer to plain floral sweetness.

A different flower entirely, but a traditional one in the same kitchens.

Best for

Turkish, Persian and Levantine desserts, syrups for baklava and semolina cake, cooks who find rose water soapy

Citrus-floral rather than rose-floral, so it tastes correct for the cuisine without imitating rose. This is a good honest choice if you accept a change of perfume, and many people prefer it, but nobody will mistake it for gul receli.

The South Asian version of the same idea: rose petals macerated with sugar, often with a little cardamom or fennel.

Best for

any recipe calling for rose petal jam, ice cream, kulfi and milk sweets, spreading on bread or stuffing into pastries

This is the nearest thing to an exact swap, because it is the same ingredient made a different way. It is usually darker, less cooked and sometimes more spiced, so if the recipe is delicate, taste for cardamom or fennel before you commit a whole batch to it.

The least-bad option when the petals themselves are part of the point.

Best for

baklava and pastries where you can see the filling, ice cream that should have petal threads in it, getting closest to the real texture

There is no substitute that gives you actual rose petals except actual rose petals. Use food-grade dried petals, shred them fine, and warm them into the jam for a minute so they soften. They stay a little more papery than the slow-cooked petals in real receli.