Flour has always been an integral element of the fundamentals of Indian food. It doesn’t matter if the cuisine is North Indian, South, East or West; each housewife relies heavily on one type of core flour for her daily preparations.
The interesting part is that most cuisines in modern India are heavily dependent on a particular type of flour such as Besan flour or wheat flour or rice flour. Most worryingly, due to the advent of Western cuisine and the influence of fast food, over independence and the invisible dominance of some not so healthy varieties like refined flour (also called Maida), have started to show some unpleasant effects. .
Lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity and blood pressure imbalance are on the rise. At the same time, the deficiency of important nutrients is having a widespread impact on all other households.
This is probably the best time to go back and delve into the history of India and its heart. The core of Indian cuisine lies in a mixture of different flavors and flours. The remote villages and rural population of the country have been harvesting locally grown food for years and that includes a blend of flours that gives them core strength and stamina to handle physically intensive tasks like farming, harvesting, forestry, etc.
This is a wake-up call for urban eaters and it’s about time we realized that just scraping our daily food intake is not going to help us boost our long-term health goals in any way. It’s easy and sometimes forgivable to lose important nutrients in the daily grind and fast blur of life. But sooner or later, the small and big symptoms serve to remind us that our body needs everything in a good, balanced and multidimensional way.
Avoiding one-dimensional eating habits is the first step in striving for that balance. Try to include more types of flour in your daily diet. They not only provide essential fiber for the functioning of the digestive and renal systems, but also inject important vitamins and sources of energy that the human body needs.
Having a good mix of ragi, besan, bajra etc. Organics in the daily batter of wheat and rice flour would add more flavor and variety that every Indian diner desperately seeks. In fact, many interesting recipes are enhanced by the use of varied proportions of ragi, wheat, etc., and many vegetables and snacks turn amazing in a quick batter of good rice or besan flour. They range from Gujarati Dhokla, Rajasthani Baati or Rotla, Maharashtrian Thalipeeth, to South Indian Idli or Porridge or Mudde varieties. Of course you can also make delicious cookies or cakes with the amazing mix.
Once you start to develop the habit of using and mixing these flours in your routine, you can also start experimenting with lots of dishes and take advantage of organic variants that add more health to this power mix.
Ragi and millet flours give strength, and other flours give stamina. They also strongly help in weight loss and metabolism regulation. Problems like cholesterol levels or diabetes can be easily eliminated with a careful blend of various grains and flours in a good recipe.
They lack gluten that other flours have. They contain fiber that other flours lack. They are low in unsaturated fat. Their natural and unrefined characteristics immediately set them apart from the usual flours that are often consumed in a hurry or out of habit. They are best used in their natural form and therefore do not require polishing, giving them a distinct place in the food system.
These healthy organic flours like besan and rice flour are also now just as readily available and affordable as their not-so-healthy counterparts. They are not bland, they can be mixed in any recipe and, in addition, they combine well with each other in various formats.
Packed with nutrition and ripe with minerals, iron, calcium, etc., this is the same multi-grain wonder that the Western world’s Granola bars provide. Why not choose something Indian and right at your fingertips to get the same package of benefits?
