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If you have lived in South India, chances are, you are familiar with ragi (also called finger millet or nachni).

A generation or two ago, ragi featured commonly in the Indian states where the crop is cultivated. The once well-known cereal is however diminishing from most people’s diets today. It is unfortunate, considering the nutritive and therapeutic value of ragi towards health and well-being. Ragi has high protein content, is a rich source of minerals, helps control diabetes, keeps weight in check, battles anemia, reduces 'bad' cholesterol and has anti-cancer properties. I can't think of a single reason why we shouldn't incorporate this miracle cereal into our diet! It won't be long before this one finds recognition in the International 'superfoods' list (that has become quite the craze in recent years).

Despite hailing from Karnataka and living most of my life in Mysore, ragi is not something that I grew up eating. The reason being that ragi isn't originally a part of Udupi-style cuisine. Ragi mudde, Ragi Dosa and ragi rotti are dishes that I used to see most of my friends and neighbours eating. I was curious about the dark brown ragi-containing dishes that didn't look appetizing to me at all. As I grew older, my mum did start experimenting with ragi by making ragi rotti once in awhile but I wasn't too keen on it back then. Ragi is definitely an acquired taste so over the years, in the form of rotti and dosa (I'm still not a fan of mudde), I've somewhat grown accustomed to it.

This is the instant version of ragi dosa that I am sharing with you which means no fermentation required (yay!). At first, I tried making ragi dosas using just ragi flour but it felt like something wasn't quite right. I then started adding in a little bit of this and that to make the taste and texture better. I found that incorporating rava (semolina), rice flour and whole wheat flour made the dosas much more palatable. After several trials, I arrived at this particular recipe and it has been my go-to recipe ever since. It appears on our breakfast table during the weekends very frequently even replacing rava dosa which was a previous favourite. Maybe calling it ragi dosa would be a bit unjustified since it contains other dry ingredients too but we'll just go with the name ragi dosa, because I say so okay?