Ingredient

Millet

Millet is not one grain but a family of small-seeded cereals grown across Africa and Asia, feeding a very large number of people. In a Western kitchen it usually means proso millet — small, round, yellow — and it has a useful property: cooked one way it is light and fluffy, cooked another it is creamy like a porridge.

The millets

Several different grains under one word.

Proso millet

Small, round, pale yellow. The one sold in Western health food shops. Mild, faintly corn-like.

Pearl millet (bajra)

Larger, grey-brown. Widely grown in India and West Africa. Ground into flour for flatbreads — bajra roti — with a distinct earthy flavour.

Finger millet (ragi)

Small, reddish-brown. Ground into flour across South India and East Africa for porridge, dosa and flatbread. Nutty and dark.

Foxtail, kodo, little millet

Several further species widely eaten in India, each with its own character.

Fonio

A West African millet — see fonio — cooked as a very fine grain.

Sorghum

A close relative, often grouped with the millets, larger-grained.

Cooking it fluffy

The version that works as a rice substitute.

1. Rinse the millet. It can carry a dusty, slightly bitter residue.
2. Toast it in a dry pan or with a little oil for three or four minutes, until it smells nutty and starts to pop. This is the step that makes the difference — untoasted millet tends to clump, and toasted millet stays separate.
3. Add about two parts liquid to one part millet, salted or stock.
4. Bring to the boil, cover, and simmer on the lowest heat for around fifteen to twenty minutes.
5. Take it off the heat and leave it covered for ten minutes without lifting the lid.
6. Fluff with a fork. The grains should be separate and light.

Cooking it creamy, and everything else

• For a porridge, use much more liquid — three to four parts — do not toast it, stir it as it cooks, and let it go past the point where the grains hold their shape. It becomes creamy and thick, rather like a fine polenta.
• As a savoury porridge with butter and cheese, in place of polenta.
• Set and fried, exactly as polenta is — pour the creamy version into a tray, cool, slice and fry.
• In West African cooking, as a fermented porridge or steamed and served with stew.
• Bajra roti and ragi mudde in India, made from the ground flours rather than the whole grain.
• In salads, the fluffy version, cooled.
• In bread, whole grains soaked and added for texture.
• Season it hard. Millet is mild to the point of blandness, and stock, salt, fat and acid all improve it considerably.

Why millet matters, and why it is unfamiliar here

Millets feed a very large number of people. They are grown across the Sahel, East Africa, India and China, they tolerate drought and poor soil far better than wheat or rice, and they mature in a short season — which is precisely why they are staples in places where the rainfall is unreliable.

They became unfamiliar in Britain and much of Europe for reasons that have nothing to do with the grain: wheat yields better in a temperate climate with reliable rain, and the twentieth-century grain trade organised itself around wheat, rice and maize. Millet did not fail here so much as it was never the obvious choice.

Interest in it has grown recently, partly because the same qualities that made it a staple in dry regions — drought tolerance, short season, low input requirements — look increasingly relevant elsewhere. That is an agricultural argument rather than a nutritional claim, and it is worth keeping the two apart: millet is a good grain to cook with because it is cheap, quick, mild and versatile, which is reason enough.

Common questions