Illupai poo Samba - Imperfectly Perfect
Our favourite Illupai poo Samba is back in Bio Basics. Harvested during January 2022, aged and a small batch freshly milled. The delightful, nutritious, scented, healthy rice is ready to come home with you!
This time our organic Illupai poo Samba has a mixture of organic red rice. What does this mean? It is when different varieties get mixed up in the field or mill or at any stage of the growing or processing inadvertently. This seems to have happened because the Illupai poo Samba comes from our Uma farmer in Palakkad and the previous crop on the land was Uma and Jyoti.
The residual seeds of the red rice that were dormant sprouted due to plentiful rains and grew with the Illupai poo samba. Machine harvest was done in the hope that the colour sorter machine can separate the grains. But the mill was unable to do it. Otherwise this would have involved hand harvesting the two kinds of plants separately. That is a tedious process, however, in the case of Illupai poo Samba it would have been simpler as the paddy of Illupai poo Samba is black in colour and most other paddy grains are brown in colour. Once the paddy seeds came out one could see the black paddy of Ilupai and the brown paddy of the red rice. According to our estimate the mix is about 20%. But the farmer and we decided to mill it and use it as it's too precious. The mix is delicious, fragrant and healthy.
The fragrance and taste and texture of the Illupai poo Samba is very much there. But we want to let you know there is a mix and have you enjoy this mix that nature gave us, which despite sorting is here to remind us that farming is not ever completely in our control. Here is our lunch plate on a rainy day with the semi polished Ilupai poo Samba (first pic). The mix is not evident in the semi polished version (second pic) unless you look carefully when you can see the red rice grains with the bran mostly removed.
In the third picture the unpolished rice clearly shows the distinctive greenish hue of the Ilupai poo Samba and of course the bold red hue of the inadvertent red rice mix. Join us in celebrating this imperfection in this harvest as we embrace our own imperfections. However, as with everything not perfect, the rice is healthy, tasty and amazing.
Just to remind you this is rice with amazing nutritive properties, very healing, soothing and once you fall in love with it; there is no falling out of love. It is slightly sticky rice so best used for variety rices like pongal, kichadi, sambar rice, bisi bele baath and numerous such preparations. We love it as table rice and also love to make south East Asian sticky rice preparations. Both the unpolished & semi polished Illupai poo Samba are back in the store. Pick up a couple of packs, enjoy it, let us know how you like it and what you prepare with it. Share your dishes and recipes with us. Those of you who love Illupai poo Samba do not hesitate to pick up the rice. We have a limited quantity of it.