Khichdi: Indian cuisine
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Khichdi: Indian cuisine
Recipe: Khichdi with oats, tomato and garlic
Winter is 'the' time to experiment and it is the season to let the farm fresh ingredients add a hint of lip smacking taste. Ingredients like spring garlic, ginger and spring onion simply add different tastes and texture to a preparations. Similarly, the basic ingredient can also be replaced by other ingredients to add another element of difference to a dish. Making khichdi with oats is one such preparation that does not require much time. Easy to prepare and very sustaining the oats khichdi when cooked with tomatoes, potatoes and farm fresh chives, is a yummy treat to the taste buds.
Ingredients
Oats: 100 gms Moong dal: 2 table spoons Tomatoes: two Potato: 1 Spring garlic: a couple (as per your liking) Spring onion: a couple (as per your liking) Ginger: chopped - little quantity Curry leaves: few Red chilli whole: 1 to 2 Salt to taste Turmeric: a pinch Ground pepper: a pinch Mustard and hing for tadka
Method
In a pan, take two to three tsp of oil or ghee and heat it. Put hing and mustard seeds to the hot oil and as soon the mustard seeds start to crackle add the halved whole red chillies, curry leaves, followed by chopped tomatoes, diced potato, chopped ginger, chopped spring garlic and spring onion. Mix the ingredients well. Add moong dal, ground pepper and salt. Allow these ingredients to cook in steam for two minutes by covering the lid. Take the lid off and add 50 to 100 ml of water for the entire thing to cook well.
Note: For the moong dal to cook quicker, just soak it for about 15 minutes before cooking, that way you will be able to save on the cooking time. Once moong dal and potatoes are cooked, add oats. Mix the ingredients well. Add 50 to 100 ml of water. And allow the entire khichdi to cook for another 5 to 10 minutes. Serve the piping hot khichdi along with ginger flavoured tea or a hot cuppa of coffee.
Popularity and varieties
As in 2019
Sonam Joshi, Dec 15, 2019 Times of India
From: Sonam Joshi, Dec 15, 2019 Times of India
When Preet Kadia shifted out of his home in Ahmedabad, first to study and then work with different hotels for over seven years, he was often forced to eat out because of his erratic work timings. “I realised there was a need for food that was light on the stomach and pocket, and yet connected with everyone.” That was how a restaurant called Urban Khichdi was born in July 2018. It has since expanded to six branches in Gujarat and serves 50 types of khichdi, including a low-carb keto one, khichdi sizzlers and cheese bombs, and even a Namo khichdi with three dals and no onion and garlic. “Khichdi was considered boring,” he explains. “To convince people to pay for it, khichdi needed a facelift.”
And what a facelift it’s been. Once a dish that was considered suitable only for toothless babies and those on a Zantac diet, this combo of carbs and lentils is now a star dish on restaurant menus from Mumbai to Manhattan. Chef Manish Mehrotra of Indian Accent, a fine dining restaurant, serves a bajra parmesan khichdi in Delhi, New York and London while Manu Chandra’s gastropub Monkey Bar features a butter chicken and paneer khichdi on its menu. On Instagram, the food lovers’ mecca, #khichdi has over 28K posts and even The New York Times posts ‘kichri’ recipes.
Khichdi’s claim to fame can be traced back to 2017 when an attempt to declare it as the national dish sparked off controversies, and several odes to the Indian comfort food which has umpteen regional variations. It also inspired Mumbai-based tour operator Jitendra Shah to start a restaurant celebrating the dish. Started in 2018, Khichdi The Global Food has four outlets in Mumbai and dishes out 75 varieties in earthen vessels. “People think of it as a poor man’s food, something you eat when you are sick or have nothing else to cook. But we want to make it a rich one,” says Shah.
But it isn’t always easy to convince customers to go out and spend money on it, as Nagpur-based Khichadiwala discovered in 2014. “Customers would often walk out after discovering there were no rotis or non-vegetarian food on the menu,” says co-founder Manish Khanchandani. Over time, Khichadiwala managed to find a loyal following and now has six outlets across Pune, Bengaluru, Nagpur and Hyderabad serving everything from a Nagpur-inspired Saoji khichdi to an Italian one (what is risotto but a khichdi sans lentils).
The khichdi’s leap into the limelight is captured not just by stand-alone restaurants that have mushroomed across the country but also by online delivery services. In July, Ola launched a cloud kitchen brand called Khichdi Experiment, which offers 16 kinds of khichdi in six metros. “Most people order food for indulgence but there is a need for food which can be ordered for day-to-day consumption. We chose khichdi because it is a dish every Indian is familiar with,” says Anshul Khandelwal, head of marketing and revenue, Ola Foods. He adds that Khichdi Experiment gets a few thousand orders every day, with revenue reaching crores in just four months. The menu has several regional iterations like the Gujarati khatti meethi dal khichdi, Kerala manthan khichdi, Bengali panch phoran khichdi and Mumbai pao bhaji, with plans to launch non-vegetarian and international variations soon. Noida’s Bhaath.in might be much smaller but does its own bit to showcase the diversity of the one-pot meal with a Himachali version and a UP ki Tehri. Delhibased Mamta Batra’s The Khichdi Company, a delivery-only eatery, allows people to customise their orders according to the lentils, vegetables and flavours they want (including Maggi masala and oregano).
“Every household has a khichdi they associate with their grandmother,” says Rajesh Sawhney, founder of online cloud kitchen company InnerChef which launched a new brand called Grandma’s Khichdi this year. It features recipes contributed by real-life grandmothers, as well as those made with quinoa, black rice and dalia. Sawhney compares khichdi’s rise to biryani’s, which has gained pan-India popularity in the last two years. “There is a deep desire to eat healthier food, which may not always mean salads but just simple lighter food. Khichdi can be as big as the biryani market in India, if not bigger,” he adds.
