Ready, steady, cook!

Want to cook with millets, but have no idea where to start? Chef Thomas tells you how

By Google Arts & Culture

Meet the Chef!

Chef Thomas Zacharias helmed the kitchen at the award-winning Mumbai restaurant The Bombay Canteen for nearly a decade, where he served contemporary regional Indian cuisine, with a focus on local and seasonal ingredients. Zacharias also previously worked at Le Bernardin, New York City’s famed three-Michelin-star eatery. 

 In 2022, he founded The Locavore, a platform that champions local produce and fosters meaningful connections between stakeholders in the Indian food system. The Locavore recently launched The Millet Revival Project (MRP), in association with the Rainmatter Foundation. Here we chat about cooking with these diverse grains.

Malvani Jack & Jowar Taco
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Question: The Millet Revival Project includes a Cooking Lab. What have been the highlights so far?

Chef Thomas: We have eight volunteers as part of our Cooking Lab. These are home chefs from different parts of the country, each of whom has been assigned a single millet to work with. They’ve been recipe testing, and in the process, exchanging stories and tips on  how different millets have traditionally been used in their homes and communities. We have about 60-65 recipes that we hope to compile into a book soon. One of the best dishes we’ve created is a Malvani jowar birria taco that we served at a couple of Mumbai restaurants as part of an extensive millet menu we created.

Janagiamma, leader from the indigenous Kurumba community of the Nilgiris holding her millet chicken biryani
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Question: What do you enjoy most about millets as an ingredient? Of all the dishes you’ve experimented with, which are you most likely to cook at home for yourself?

Chef Thomas: I’m most excited by the millets that can be consumed whole [ie the minor millets]. I like foxtail, kodo… what I like about millets in general is how diverse they are. Ragi is so different from jowar, for example. It’s great for baking. It’s been interesting to learn about the nuances of each millet - which ones work with what cooking technique, and what they pair well with. The dish I’m most likely to cook at home is the foxtail millet chicken biryani by Janagiamma, an elder from the indigenous Kurumba tribe from the Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. It’s simple and delicious.

Tea time snacks prepared by The Locavore's cooking volunteers led by Chef Jyoti for the millet tap takeover in Mumbai., 2023-06-04
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Question: The millet menu the team created in Mumbai was exciting, with millet and shrimp arancini, and barnyard and foxtail millet haleem (a meaty stew usually made with barley, meat and lentils). What have been the chief challenges of getting people to cook with millets?

Chef Thomas: The biggest apprehension is of not knowing how to cook with millets, and or having limited ways of doing so. Also millets’ reputation of being a healthy food is a double-edged sword as people assume healthy food is flavourless. So we have to find ways to make millets interesting.

Millet Cooking Workshop with Millet Coach Shalini Rajani to discover these ancient, nutrient-rich grains & their potential as a staple ingredient in everyday meals in your own home., 2023-05-27
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Question: What advice would you give someone just starting their millet journey? 

Chef Thomas: In the cooking workshop we did [with Millet Coach Shalini Rajani], we learned some basic hacks. For example, the importance of washing, then soaking millets for 8-10 hours (major millets) and 4-6 hours (for minor millets) to remove their anti-nutrients. Next, the millets should be sun dried and can be stored in your fridge to increase shelf life. The major millets - jowar, bajra, ragi - are usually consumed as atta (flour), whereas the minor millets can be used as a substitute for rice. Unpolished millets retain more of their nutrients than polished ones so those are the ones you want to buy.

Great State Aleworks X The Locavore's collaborative beer - Salt of the Earth - part of GSA's millet beer series, 2023-06-04
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Question: Do you have a favourite millet-based product? 

Chef Thomas: The Salt of the Earth millet beer that we recently launched with Great State Aleworks! A tasty Jowar Cashew Sour, it’s brewed with cashew apple juice and sorghum sourced from our producer partner Tillage. It’s the sixth in GSA's millet beer series. We also launched a Millet Beer Brewing Handbook which shares our learnings of working with millets to brew beer, and which we hope will encourage other Indian craft brewers to experiment further… Even though millets are about 30% of the grain bill in Salt of the Earth, we can still push the needle [and create a sizable demand for millets] because of the volumes involved.

Credits: Story

Chef Thomas Zacharias is the former Chef Partner at the award-winning Mumbai restaurant The Bombay Canteen. For nearly a decade, Zacharias served inventive regional Indian cuisine, where local and seasonal ingredients shone. Zacharias also previously worked at Le Bernardin, New York City’s famed three-Michelin-star eatery.  

In 2022, founded The Locavore, a platform that brings together storytelling, working with local produce, and nurturing connections between people within the Indian food system to make an impact through food. 

Among their major projects is The Millet Revival Project, in association with the Rainmatter Foundation, which aims to demystify cooking with millets and to spotlight the impact that millets have on our ecology.

All images courtesy The Locavore

Credits: All media
The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.
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