Go with the grain

In a world of food lovers, there are plenty of options for one to choose from. However, there has been the realisation that one needs to bring about a change in their lifestyle by going for healthier food choices.

     Restaurants are also working hard towards helping people follow a healthy lifestyle — substituting refined food with wholegrain food that modern cooking has forgotten. Grains like amaranth, barley, pearl millet, finger millet and sorghum are being increasingly used in a wholesome form.

Chef Saurabh Arora, executive chef at ‘Smoke House Deli’, has included some of these grains in the menu. He says, “Many don’t realise that we can easily substitute the refined food we have been consuming with these healthy grains. We wanted to bring about a change in people’s mentality and have introduced a menu that has over 35 items made with them.”

Some of the dishes are ‘sorghum gnocchi tossed with tomato based sauce and mushroom’, ‘fettucini pasta made with sorghum’ and ‘millet risotto’. He has also created a cheesecake where a type of ‘ragi’ is used for the crust while soy milk and a bit of mascarpone cheese and coconut are used for the filling. Saurabh says, “It’s not necessary that everytime someone mentions ‘healthy’, it has to mean only salads. We can easily adopt these grains in our daily lives and lead a healthy life.”

Even before the fad of ‘being healthy’ became the talk of the town, Yogish Appajaiah, the director of ‘The Green Path — Forgotten Food’, started promoting healthy eating habits. “We’ve been around for a while now, but the business has received a boost of late because people want to be healthy. This also helps decrease lifestyle diseases. We are also educating those who walk into our kitchen about the traditional recipes prepared with these grains so that they can also make them at home,” he explains. Some of the popular dishes at his restaurant are ‘millet soup’, ‘foxtail millet dumplings’, ‘bisi bele bath’, ‘red rice dosa’ and ‘millet pizza’. 

For those who don’t want to always go out, they are purchasing all kinds of grains for use at home. In fact, many markets have brought in the initiative to talk about these healthy grains and are encouraging many to use them at home.

Swasti Aggarwal, food strategist at Foodhall, says, “Due to our busy schedules, we’ve opted for refined food for many years now. But we’ve also come to the realisation that we need to bring back the health factor in our lives and by adopting certain diets, it helps one do so. Each of these grains has its own flavour and it helps enhance the taste of the food. Many have started experimenting even though it takes a bit longer than what we are used to making.”

And if you think that it’s usually the high-end food that can be produced with these grains, you’re wrong. Nithya Mehta, the founder of ‘Feastlite’, has been supplying her version of these forgotten grains. She says, “I’ve grown up having these grains at home and I wanted the rest of the world to also experience that. I supply dishes like ‘ragi idli and dosa’, ‘oats pancakes with foxtail millet’, ‘khichdi’ and ‘pulao’.”

As many food lovers are opting for the healthier choices and restaurants are happy to create dishes for them, the main aim for chefs is to break the myth that these grains are boring and tasteless.

As Yogish says, “It’s not that easy to promote good things to everyone these days, but we’re trying to do the best we can to spread the message.”