What is your favorite flour?
Flour has always been an integral element of the basics of Indian food. It doesn’t matter if the cuisine is North Indian, South, East or West; each housewife relies heavily on a central type of flour for her daily preparations.
The interesting part is that most cuisines in modern India rely heavily on a particular type of flour, such as Besan flour or wheat flour or rice flour. The most worrying thing is that due to the advent of Western cuisine and the influence of fast food, on independence and the invisible dominance of some not-so-healthy varieties such as refined flour (also called Maida), they 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, deficiencies in important nutrients are 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 mix of different flavors and flours. Faraway villages and the country’s rural population have been harvesting locally grown food for years and that includes a mix of flours that gives them core strength and stamina to handle physically intensive tasks like farming, harvesting, sustaining 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 miss out on important nutrients in the daily grind and fast-moving blur of life. But sooner or later, the small and large 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 fighting for that balance. Try to include more types of flours in your daily diet. Not only do they provide essential fiber for the functioning of the digestive and renal systems, but they also inject important vitamins and energy sources that the human body needs.
Have a good mix of ragi, besan, bajra, etc. Organics in the daily dough of wheat and rice flour would add more flavor and variety that every Indian dinner desperately seeks. In fact, many interesting recipes are enhanced by the use of varying proportions of ragi, wheat, etc., and many vegetables and snacks are made 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 mixture.
Once you begin to develop the habit of using and mixing these flours in your routine, you can also begin to experiment with many dishes and take advantage of organic variants that add more health to this energy mix.
Ragi and millet flours give strength, and other flours give resistance. They also strongly help in weight loss and metabolism regulation. Problems like cholesterol levels or diabetes can be easily eliminated by careful mixing of various grains and flours in a good recipe.
They lack the gluten that other flours have. They contain fiber that other flours lack. They are low in unsaturated fats. Their natural and unrefined characteristics immediately differentiate them from regular flours that are often consumed in a hurry or out of habit. They are best used in their natural form and therefore do not need to be polished, 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 flexibly with each other in various formats.
Packed with nutrition and ripe with minerals, iron, calcium, etc., this is the same multigrain wonder that the Western world’s Granola bars provide. Why not choose something Indian and right at your fingertips for the same benefits package?