What, according to you, is so unique about an Indian meal? We feel it's the mix of completely different ingredients, oscillating between sweet, savoury, and spicy flavours, without overlapping each other. In fact, each element shares its unique space on the plate, creating a harmony of taste, texture, and health as well. That's right! A quintessential desi thali is considered the best example of a well-planned diet, where you would find every essential nutrient complementing each other. According to Ayurveda, the food combinations in a classic Indian meal are carefully planned to balance our vata, pitta, and kapha for overall well-being. Take a simple dal-chawal platter for instance. While rice adds enough carbs to your meal, a bowl of dal enriches you with protein, fibre, and minerals. The achar served alongside contains probiotics to boost the digestion process.
Today, we will take you through another such meal option that is easily accessible and defines comfort for many. It's the humble kadhi-chawal. Besides the soothing flavours, kadhi, with chawal, is also credited for the range of benefits attached to it. Kadhi, typically made with besan and yogurt, contains fibre, protein, probiotics, healthy fats, and other essential nutrients including calcium. And with different spice concoctions in different regions, a bowl of kadhi just gets better both in terms of health and taste.
Also Read: Kadhi Recipes: Here Are 7 Best Picks From Across India
About Gujarati-Style Suva Kadhi:
Dill leaves lend suva kadhi its distinctive flavour. Photo Credit: iStock
We recently tasted one such version of kadhi from Gujarat that increases the calcium content of the dish by leaps and bounds. It is called suva kadhi. It is a variation of the typical Gujarati kadhi and includes dill leaves (called suva in Gujarati) in the recipe. You would find the same dish in Maharashtra under the name of shepuchi kadhi (shepuchi in Marathi stands for dill leaves). For the unversed, a 100-gram serving of dill leaves contains 208 mg of calcium, which, when added to the calcium-rich yogurt, helps provide almost half of a day's daily calcium requirement.
5 Reasons Why Calcium-Rich Gujarati Suva Kadhi Can Be a Part of Your Daily Diet:
1. Builds and maintains strong bones:
As mentioned earlier, dill, when mixed with yogurt, helps elevate the calcium content of the kadhi, making it good for your bones. That's not all. The dish also contains vitamin D, which supports the calcium to work smoothly in the body.
2. Strengthens teeth:
Besides bones, calcium helps strengthen oral health too. Calcium helps produce tooth enamel, making it strong and healthy.
3. Maintains weight:
It's not just protein and fibre, calcium plays an equally important role in maintaining our body weight. Calcium is known to help with the body's thermogenesis, which creates heat to metabolize nutrients and burn accumulated fat.
4. Maintains the body's pH levels:
pH affects most chemical and physiological functions that help maintain overall health. And this is where calcium comes into play. It is alkaline in nature, neutralizing the acids produced in the body, and further balancing its pH levels.
5. Supports heart health:
Studies suggest that calcium particles enter the heart muscle cells during each heartbeat, contributing to the electrical signals that promote its functioning.
Calcium-Rich Suva Kadhi Recipe | How to Make Gujarati Suva Kadhi for a Balanced Meal:
Suva kadhi also has a yogurt-besan base
The recipe is simple. You need to prepare a regular kadhi with some dill leaves in it. Start with preparing the besan-yogurt mix. Then heat a pan and sauté dill leaves with ginger and chilli. After a while, add the yogurt-besan mix, adjust the salt, and add a tadka of cumin, mustard, red chilli, and curry leaves. That's it! Your bowl of suva kadhi is ready in no time. Click here for the detailed recipe.
Pair the kadhi with a portion of rice and some achar and papad, and voila! Enjoy a balanced, nutritious, and soulful meal.
Also Read: Cooking Tips: 5 Reasons Why Your Kadhi Is Not Smooth
About Somdatta SahaExplorer- this is what Somdatta likes to call herself. Be it in terms of food, people or places, all she craves for is to know the unknown. A simple aglio olio pasta or daal-chawal and a good movie can make her day.