Making a meal of minor millets

After successfully helping farmers in the Kolli Hills of Tamil Nadu state in India, Bioversity scientists and partners are taking their results further afield and re-introducing the people of Karnataka to the many virtues of millets.

Around the world, traditional crops have lost out in the popularity stakes to ‘exotic’ crops, from wheat and rice to cabbage and lettuce. People often think of their old crops as backward and shun them as foods for the poor. But these old crops have a lot to offer. Not only are they often better adapted to local conditions—after all, they evolved in the local environment, together with all its climatic stresses, and pests and diseases—they are commonly more nutritious than the new upstarts.

Furthermore, climate change models predict that many currently neglected crops will be of enormous importance in areas expected to suffer the ravages of climate change. Minor millets, long a focus of Bioversity’s work in India, are now being embraced more widely, not only for nutrition but also as a source of increased farm incomes and greater resilience in changing farming systems.

Earlier work in the Kolli Hills in Tamil Nadu state had shown that simple changes to processing, for example the introduction of an electrically-powered minimill, could make the crop much more attractive to the women on whom the brunt of the processing work fell, see  (‘Exemplary impact of neglected species project,’ Bioversity Annual Report 2005). (362 KB)

This helped to increase demand from rural families, which in turn encouraged farmers to grow more of the crops. But to make a real breakthrough, the project would need to come up with millet-based products that would whet the appetites of more sophisticated palates and penetrate urban markets.

“We’ve been experimenting with a range of common local foods and also trying out a few novel recipes,” said Stefano Padulosi, leader of the IFAD-funded project. “We are looking at replacing wheat, rice and pulse flours with flour made from millets,” he continued.

To do that the project has moved to work with women in Karnataka state, west of Tamil Nadu. The women, organized into self-help groups, have been making a range of snacks and foods for sale as part of efforts to boost household incomes from agriculture. The project enlisted their help to test millet-based recipes, and the results are very promising.

A great substitute

Two of the stars are paddu—dough balls traditionally made from a slightly fermented mixture of rice, black gram (Vigna mungo), chickpea and pigeon pea flours— and laddu—a bit like doughnuts made from chickpea flour. Both have been adapted to use millets. The rice flour for paddu is replaced by flour made from little millet (Panicum sumatrense), while for the laddu half of the chickpea flour is substituted by flour made from foxtail millet (Setaria italica).

The results were quite a surprise.

Grinding rice to make paddu took longer than grinding little millet, and it took 9 minutes to bake rice-based paddu, compared with only 6 minutes for the millet-based mix. Less time, less energy, and furthermore the millet paddu expanded more while baking to give a larger final product and hence more profit. Paddu made with millet flour is thus a handsdown winner for the cook.

Similar although slightly smaller savings were seen with laddu. Roasting millet flour to the desired golden-brown colour was quicker than chickpea flour (35 minutes compared with 40 minutes), while cooking up a batch took only 20 minutes using millet dough, compared with 30 minutes for the chickpea-based laddu. Millet wins again.

So the cooks were happy: millet flour made their jobs quicker and easier and burned less fuel.What would consumers think?

Taste tests

The project engaged the services of a panel of trained food testers from the Food Laboratory at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad. The panel used a nine-point hedonic scale to assess the colour and appearance, texture, taste and aroma of the traditional and millet-based dishes—and the millet-based dishes passed with flying colours.

“The panel generally preferred laddu made from millet to that made using chickpea flour,” said Bhag Mal, one of the project scientists and an honorary research fellow with Bioversity. “They preferred the rice-based paddu, but the differences were small, and they rated the milletbased paddu ‘very good or better’ for all the quality characters,” he noted.

Two out of two—cooks and consumers liked snacks made with millet flour. To top it off, millet flour is generally cheaper than the constituents it replaces. Chickpea flour is about 50 Rs per kilogram, while millet flour costs just a quarter as much, around Rs 12–14/kg.

Better in so many ways

So using millet reduces the cost of the raw materials, reduces the time it takes to make the food, reduces the amount of fuel used and results in a final product that is every bit as good as the gold-standard original. Farmers win because they have more options in the crops they can grow and sell. The women who produce the food win by having products that make their lives easier and make them more money.

Consumers in the cities win with a range of foods that are familiar, tasty and healthy and that can be based on local materials. Growing the raw materials is also better for the wider environment, because they are adapted to the growing conditions and so less likely to need energy-expensive and possibly polluting inputs.

“Our pilot studies in the Kolli Hills showed us that we really ought to call these minor millets nutritious millets instead,” said Stefano Padulosi. “Now we are discovering that the lessons learned there are much more widely applicable. That helps to increase the impact of our research.”