Ready, steady, cook!

Meet the Chef!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.