Going against the grain

Let’s face it. Millets don’t fare  well on the popularity chart. You certainly don’t know how many kinds of millets there are, and this neglected family of grains isn’t the typical model for glossy food photography either. 

When it comes to our staple picks, we bring home wheat or rice, never millets. This severely misunderstood group of cereals is also highly nutritious. And as we all know, extremely good for health reads extremely bad to taste.

But we need millets. G Krishna Prasad of Sahaj Samrudha has understood this. His NGO was one of the organisers of the Millet Mela in Bangalore this weekend that brought together 35 millet growing groups from 11 states in India. “Polished rice is the door to a variety of illnesses. When India has millets growing in its backyard, it’s a terrible thing to be depending solely on wheat and rice as staple foods,” he laments.

Millet is the name given to a group of cereals other than wheat, rice, maize and barley. The kinds of millet available in India include foxtail millet, finger millet (ragi), little millet, kodo millet (haraka), proso millet, pearl millet (jowar), green millet (bajra) and barnyard millet (oodalu). 

Prasad points out that millets contain high amounts of dietary fibre, B-complex vitamins, essential amino and fatty acids and vitamin E. These seeds are also rich in phytochemicals, therefore lowering cholesterol, reducing cancer risk and preventing various lifestyle diseases. They’re also gluten free and not acid-forming, hence a great option for those with wheat allergy.

But what about taste? Aruna Pohl, whose rapport with millets began a year and a half ago, answers: “I got interested and wanted to try them out,” she says. Initially, she began by incorporating a millet mix (made of 12 different millets) to atta. “I added 10% of the mix to flour and used it to make the regular dishes.” Today, she uses a larger quantity of the mix in her cooking and testifies, after adequate culinary experimentation, that it’s not that drastic a change in taste, as much as it is in health.

She has used it to make cake, rotis, and idli. Pancakes, she says, is a lovely dish to make with some millet mix. Her six-year-nephew is a regular consumer of the cereals, and it’s pretty much what he’s grown up on, she says. Her sister even makes a mean snacky ‘kurkure millet,’ for Pohl’s nephew. “She adds chaat masala, lemon and salt to mix millet cereals and he loves it as a snack.”

For those who’d like a more drastic food switch — perhaps replacing wheat or rice with millet — it could work as a great base too, she says. Cutlets, upma, dal, porridge, poha, payasam are some of her suggestions, while millet khichdi and ragi mudde (finger millet balls) figure as toppers on her list.

Today, Pohl has started a company that promotes organic products. She informs that the nutritious value of millets has persuaded various five star hotels to incorporate it in their menus.

Chef Thomas George of Mathan Hotel started incorporating millets in his own diet about a year and a half ago. He learnt about the benefits of millets when he was working on creating a special detox menu. At the hotel, he says, guests are offered millet-based options for various dishes. There are a lot of guests who are health conscious and aware — so the millet options which are organic and high in fibre content are often the preferred ones, he adds.

For those who’d like to start on the millet trail his advice is, “Mix and match”. According to him a complete change of one’s culinary lifestyle isn’t a practical idea. “Use it as an additive, fortify your cereal and regular food with it,” he suggests. Breads, according to the chef, work wonderfully with millet, and it’s only easier for people who already prefer high fibre, whole wheat options.

Millets will alter the taste only to the extent you limit your imagination. You just need to understand the nature of the product and you can use as creatively as you want, says Thomas. With a small portion of regular flour with millet, try out lasagne, flat pasta or whatever you’d like. For children, chocolate millet cookies could be a good idea, he suggests. 

And the switch back to millets shouldn’t be difficult. “It’s what we’ve been doing for 15,000 years!” reminds KC Raghu dietician, food technologist, and founder, Pristine Organics.

“It’s only the last 20-30 years that we’ve forgotten millets,” he adds. Thepla, a millet-mix bread is eaten in Gujarat, ragi is a favourite in Karnataka, jowar and bajra have been in our diet always, he says. What millets actually suffer from is mistaken modernity. We think it’s a poor man’s diet and have been fooled into thinking of other options as better. “We get berries, oats, quinoa from other countries; we only need to look at what we already have,” he adds. And here at home, we have our good old millets — enough for everyone.