Millet Cookies: A healthy snack or just hype?

You spend hours training at the gym, drenched in sweat with sore muscles just to keep yourself fit and active, but the moment you pick the wrong snack for cheat meals, all your weeks of hard work go for a toss. Turn the packet, and you will find sugar, maida and palm oil as its top three ingredients, and that leaves behind a thirst and a craving for another one the next minute. We have accepted this as a standard snack.

We have become used to snacks made of maida and palm oil. So we asked ourselves: When did we stop feeding ourselves and start just filling ourselves? This is a question that really makes you think. We figured out that all the hype about millets was not about something new. It was a sign of the return of traditional, healthy superfoods. People realised that the old grains our grandparents used to eat, like Bajra and Jowar, are what our bodies need. We knew that just putting millet on a label was not enough. At Katori, we knew a snack needs a soul, and that soul starts in the soil and the way the basic ingredients are handled. We have been told for years that healthy food has to taste bland. But at the Saheli Millet Cookies Unit in Jobner, we decided to challenge that. This is not a
factory, with heavy machines and a chemical smell. The Saheli Millet Cookies Unit is a place that smells like toasted grain and feels warm. The human touch is not a marketing gimmick. It is in the hands of women who bake the cookies. Millets like Bajra (Pearl Millet), Jowar (Sorghum), and Ragi (Finger Millet) are what we call "miracle grains." They don't demand much from the earth, but they give everything to our bodies. They are dense with fibre, rich in iron, and slow-releasing in energy. But just using millet is not enough. To make a cookie that truly nourishes, you have to look at the entire recipe. When you pick a jar of our millet cookies, you are rejecting a highly processed biscuit and bringing home the labour of the women at our Jobner unit.

The most appealing thing about our cookies is that they don't start at a ware house, they start at our own flour mill. We refuse to buy pre-packaged flour from the market because, once the grain is ground and sits for weeks, it loses its life force. Instead, we grind our millets right here.