Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Multigrain porridge (Sathu maavu kanji), How to prepare at home? - Traditional & Simple recipe

What is multigrain porridge?

Multigrain porridge called with different names like congee, ambali, kanjee. In typical south india it is called as Sattumavu Kanji, which was given to children, pregnant women and lactating mothers. It was considered as one of the best source of nutrition for young kids and good food for elders as well. Even today, lot of people prepare this powder traditionally in their home. Combination of ingredients varies for each school of thought.

Boiled rice, Ragi, Wheat, Barley, Moong are some of commonly known ingredients. Some people adds horsegram, roasted gram, poppy seeds, almonds, and cardamom also. Porridge preparation is simple, just mix a couple spoons of powder in a glass of water and boil for a minute or two. Then add milk and sugar or buttermilk and salt as per taste. We can have this with Rasam or prepare delicious payasam with jaggery or make laddus with ghee and jaggery. Its very ideal for breakfast and healthy and nutritious food.

For people who don't like it as traditional food, can try even homemade biscuits and cakes by using this powder instead of white flour. we can make breakfast bars with this by adding honey and dry fruits. Let us see how to prepare this at home with common ingredients. Just to help, some real time tips are mentioned at the end.

Multigrain porridge (Sathu maavu kanji)- Ingredients

Ingredients of porridge

  • Cereals - Finger millet, Barley, Whole wheat, Boiled rice - Each one cup
  • Pulses - Black channa, Green gram, Roasted gram - Each one cup

Method of preparation

Choosen ingredients needs to be cleaned, sprouted, roasted and then ground to get the nutritious health mix. Let us see each step in little detail. You can check our blog post to know each process in detail.

Step 1: Cleaning/Rinsing of grains

All ingredients need to washed in normal or luke warm water separately. This makes sure any mud particles and unwanted things is removed properly. While rinsing, if any hard particles exist like stones, it get stays in the bottom of the container, we need to make sure to remove it.

Step 2: Soaking/Fermentation of the grains

This step is purely optional. Some of the ingredients can be used directly and other can be sprouted. Sprouting is extra process and time consuming. But it increases the nutritive value of the grains and makes it easily digestible. Especially when you prepare this mix for infants, it is advisable to sprout and then use. If you are not able to sprout at least allow them to be soaked for couple of hours roughly, that removes the toxin from the grains. Overnight soaking is best practice for hard grains, you can take a call based on your convenience.

In our set of ingredients, Finger millet, whole wheat, black channa, green moong can be sprouted. Sprout each grain separately. We need to plan accordingly as it take a day or two. I mean, choose the ingredient for sprouting and start the process one day before, So that it will be ready and we can move to next step for all grains in same day.

Step 3: Roasting of grains

After soaking and sprouting allow the grains to get dry in a dry cloth under a fan or in cool dry place. Once it is properly dried, then we can roast each one separately in the dry pan one by one. Keep the flame of low mode while roasting. Once you feel the aroma of roasted grain, remove it from pan and allow it cool. It may take 2 minutes to 5 minutes depends on the grain. Small grains like finger millet will gets roast faster in compare with chick peas. You can mix all the grains now while its get cool.

Step 4: Ground the mixture

You can get this ground in a floor mill. Allow the powder to get cooled completely and store it in a air tight container.

Some things to keep in mind in the process

  1. You can also choose more grains as ingredients based on your choice like Amaranth Seeds, Horse gram, Foxtail millet, Little millet, Groundnuts, Oats grain/ flakes, Sago, Cardamom and Almonds.
  2. Combination of grains and quantity of grains is purely choice of us.
  3. Each step till roasting should be handled separately for each grains, as the size of grains vary.
  4. Request you to ground some plain rice in floor mill before the mixture. In public places, they keep grounding various things, grounding rice first, cleanses the machine and also unwanted or previous grounded things comes out along with rice flour.
  5. Hot powder attract moisture that in turn reduce the shelf life of powder and also gives bad aroma and infected faster.
  6. Normally if we store in a air tight container, it stays for couple of months. We can prepare this is in small quantities as and when we require.
  7. We can change the combination of ingredients however we want to get different taste every time.

How to prepare porridge?

Mix 2 spoons of powder in half glass of water. Mix throughly without lumps and allow it to boil in low flame for couple of minutes. It gets thick and porridge is ready. Milk and sugar can be added upon once taste and consumed. You can also try with salt and buttermilk.

Multigrain porridge (Sathu maavu kanji), Traditional & Simple recipe

Other multigrain recipes:

  1. You can prepare sweet porridge by mixing jaggery and some roasted cashews with saffron and cardamom.
  2. Mix the equal amount powder and jaggery with some melted ghee and just prepare balls by holding in hands tightly (like we prepare laddu). This can be healthy snack.

Don't worry, we have followed all this process when we produce ammae products. Check out Ammae's Tasty Cereal Mix (an Multigrain porridge for General nutrition) and Health Mix(an instant porridge).

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