Home-Made Multi-Grain Atta| How To Make Multi-Grain Atta At Home

If you have been reading my blog for some time now, you would know that we, as a family, have been taking baby steps towards a more natural, healthier, eco-friendly lifestyle. We have been trying to cut out packaged, processed foods from our grocery carts as much as we can. Over a year ago, we started getting our own atta ground from whole wheat at a flour mill – something we haven’t stuck to very consistently, but do off and on. This year, we surely want to be more regular with this – we want to stop buying atta off supermarket shelves altogether.

Over the last few months, we went one step ahead and tried to make our own multi-grain atta. We experimented with ingredients, quantities, techniques, and then finally arrived at a recipe that satisfies us on all counts. The recipe for home-made multi-grain atta that I am going to tell you about today works perfectly for us. It yields soft, fluffy rotis, and we can hardly tell the difference from rotis made with just whole wheat flour. It is more nutritious, more fortified than whole wheat flour, too, of course. I use the same multi-grain atta to make cakes, pooris, parathas and the like, and the results have been wonderful.

It has been so, so, so satisfying, this whole experience of experimenting with different ingredients and ratios. Making things from scratch always gives us a high, and this phase did too. It is a joy to know what exactly goes into your multi-grain atta, and to know that you can regulate the ingredients, change them every month. Love!

Now, without further ado, we’ll get to the recipe for home-made multi-grain atta, shall we?

Ingredients (yields about 6.5 kg atta):

1. 5 kg whole wheat
2. 250 grams soya beans
3. 250 grams dried corn (sometimes also called ‘popcorn seeds’)
4. 250 grams sorghum (jowar)
5. 250 grams pearl millet (bajra)
6. 250 grams gram daal (chana daal)
7. 200 grams oats
8. 200 grams barley
9. 250 grams flax seeds

Method:

1. Clean all the ingredients thoroughly, ensuring there are no worms, stones or mud.

2. Mix all the ingredients together thoroughly. Get them ground finely at a flour mill.

3. Let the ground flour cool down completely and then store in a clean, dry, air-tight container. Use as required, using only a clean, dry spoon to remove.

Notes:

1. You may omit one or two of the ingredients from the above list, except for the whole wheat of course.
2. I used Punjabi Sharbati wheat to make this atta. The other ingredients came off supermarket shelves. If you have access to foodgrains grown organically or to farmers from whom you can get these ingredients directly, nothing like it!
3. This home-made multi-grain atta can be used to make everything from rotis and parathas to pooris and kachoris. I don’t find any major difference between using this atta and the store-bought one we used to use earlier, but the family thinks the rotis are turning out a tad thicker than they used to. Honestly, that is just a small sacrifice we would readily make for being able to use home-made atta.
4. Make sure the atta is ground finely in the mill. Coarsely ground atta may yield thick rotis.
5. If you have a gharghanti i.e. a small flour mill that is meant for domestic usage (quite popular in Gujarat and parts of Maharashtra), you can grind the flour at home yourself as well.
6. Every time you get this muli-grain atta ground, you can slightly alter the ingredients. For instance, use ragi instead of bajri and horse gram instead of flax seeds. This way, you can ensure that you get nutrients from different ingredients every time!
7. You can slightly increase the quantity of the ingredients other than whole wheat (chana daal, jowar, bajri, etc.), depending upon your personal taste preferences.

Do try this recipe for home-made multi-grain atta out, and let me know how you found it!