Adam Bites The Tin Can

Powder For Thought

Plus factors: Ease of use, longer shelf life, and health benefits.

• Dehydrated foods Garlic powder, ginger powder, tomato powder, corn powder, onion powder. These drastically reduce time taken to thicken and flavour curries.
• Flavours Dried mango powder (not amchur), amla powder, broccoli powder, green chilli powder. Are easier to handle in shakes, salads and purees.
• Health supplements Ready-to-eat ayurvedic or unani formulations like powdered
  chyawanprash have new appeal for younger consumers. Ready-to-cook khichri and soya flakes are for those who have forgotten the traditional recipes.

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Dr Monica Gulati of the School of Applied Medical Sciences at Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar, says the trend has its benefits. Her university recently developed lozenges of joshanda, a mixture of seven herbs known for centuries to cure cough, and has applied for a patent. “Usually, joshanda is bought raw and boiled for half an hour, strained and cooled before drinking. It can be a hassle,” she says. The lozenge, she says, beats the syrup because it stays longer in the throat; it also appeals to a younger clientele. The university is also developing a powdered granular chyawanprash, to be mixed in milk or eaten by the crunchy tablespoonful—no more black, gooey paste.

Some of these packaged foods are reviving strict ayurvedic or unani principles—such as a pre-packaged khichri mix, which contains the right measures of rice and dal, with spices and medicinal herbs added. Others guarantee 100 per cent organic content. So an entire shelf of health benefits can be bought at the supermarket. But the big advantage, says Bakshish Dean, corporate chef of Lite Bite Foods, a food-court business, is to the slowly changing Indian palate. “A home-cooked meal can now have vegetables and spices that don’t grow within a 1,000-mile radius,” he says. His only reservation is that people are buying pre-mixed khichri, for instance, because they’ve clearly forgotten what goes into the dish and how.

Food processing companies, though, are happy. Once largely focused on exports, they are turning their attention to domestic opportunity. “Indians have only just started experimenting with food,” says Amit C. Chaudhary, who runs a small company near Pune that supplies broccoli powder on demand, among a host of other powders, pastes and gels of wheat germ, mango, kokum  etc. His other specialty is alphonso mango powder—available on demand. The mango powder isn’t amchur, the commonly used dried raw mango powder. The latest freeze-drying and processing technologies allow ripe mangoes to be powdered as well, preserving taste and most of the nutrient value. “Those who know the health benefits of broccoli or mango want to add it to their meals or snacks, and such people create our market,” Chaudhary says. As for amchur, the latest research is preventing it from becoming antiquated. Dr Charu Gupta, a researcher and teacher at Amity University in Noida, says amchur is a great germ-buster, particularly useful in tackling tooth decay. Though her findings are far from complete—amchur toothpaste is not likely to be launched tomorrow—it adds to an increasing body of work in research institutions trying to create marketable products from herbal and traditional recipes.

As a result of these efforts, soon, the little processing that an urban Indian housewife is still forced to do—such as grinding green chillies into paste—will become as outmoded as forcing spoonfuls of chyawanprash down adolescent throats. Their work is spurred on by the realisation that most nutrients, other than Vitamin C, can indeed be preserved during food processing. “The efficacy can be preserved, depending on how carefully, and at what temperature, the processing is done,” says Gupta.

Late last year, scientists at the Central Institute of Post-Harvest Engineering and Technology (CIPHET), Ludhiana,  developed the technology to turn green chilli into powder and licensed it to manufacturers such as Ludhiana-based Dharam Pal. “I hadn’t seen or even heard of green chilli powder, but after the technology transfer I have come very close to getting the right composition, colour etc defined in the lab tests,” he says. Dr Dilip Jain of CIPHET, who  led the research, says the plan is to procure green chillies from four or five locations across the country and create powdered versions of each variety.

From time to time, the fad for repackaged foods and farm products helps farmers get better prices or improve yield. The chilli, for instance, if harvested green, helps improve yield from farms, says Dr Jain. In Gujarat’s Mahuva region, a hub for processing onion and garlic, farmers sell 70,000 bags of onion a day through auctions to 60-odd processing units. A kilo of dry onion powder keeps for a year and a half, and, when mixed with water, makes as much onion paste as 10 kilos of the fresh vegetable.

“Though this region has been developed to fulfil export demands, we’re finding demand is rising in homes as well for powdered versions of foods such as potatoes,” says Sagar Patel, proprietor of a unit in Mahuva that makes onion rings, paste, powder and flakes.

How good some of this stuff tastes is another matter, of course. Shaun Kenworthy, a celebrity cook, food consultant and columnist, says dried vegetables may replace fresh ones but “not in my lifetime”. “Nothing really can replace the real fresh vegetables,” he says—and he can’t think of any alternative that he uses for the real thing, except tried and tested freeze-dried potatoes or milk powder, which everyone knows can improve milkshakes and ice-cream.

That said, there’s no denying that the new products combine ease-of-use with medical benefits. They also last longer, and researchers promise that conventionally bitter pills will become easier for the squeamish younger generation to swallow—karela juice, for instance, could appear in a powder or pill version. Forgotten recipes will be presented on a platter as well. All you have to do is add salt to taste, but just until you forget how to do that too.