Bhakta rice using basmati rice in a rice cooker

What is Bhakta Rice?

Bhakta Rice is mentioned in Bhava Prakasha-one of the ancient Ayurvedic texts. It is cooked with salt, cumin, hingu and ghee and is usually mashed up and has the consistency of a porridge. (Picture below). Sometimes it is also cooked with buttermilk. Alternatively it can be served with buttermilk for someone recovering from a health imbalance, or digestive issues.  Usually white rice with husk removed is used. And, other times if a person's agni can tolerate brown rice and they need the fibre--then we use brown basmati rice. This recipe below is using brown basmati rice.

It doesn't look very attractive, however is quite balancing for those whose digestion is recovering from an imbalance. 

Materials

Rice Cooker or Pot
 

Rice cookers are very convenient. Basically, wash your rice, add water, oil or ghee and salt, then turn it on and forget about it (or even set a delay to have it start cooking later).

Even the basic mid-range rice cookers have a setting for whole grains or brown rice, but the results may be less than satisfactory. Brown rice is much better for you due to the additional fiber not removed by polishing the rice husk, but this also makes brown rice harder to cook. Where long-grain white basmati rice might cook in 15-20 minutes, brown rice may easily  take 45 minutes or longer.

There's a very simple hack to cook brown rice (we used organic brown basmati rice) in your rice cooker and get superior results every time. The secret is to use the right amount of water.

Normally you might use 2 cups of water for every cup of rice. We want to use 4 cups of water for every cup of brown rice. This will take slightly longer but will result in soft, easily digested rice grains. This is called bhakta rice in Ayurveda and is the easiest to digest. The traditional method of preparing bhakta rice is to cook it by boiling in water until the grains are completely split and soft. Instead of watching a pot of boiling rice, then having to strain it out, we just measure the right amount of rice.

For example, to serve 3-4 people, we used

• 1.5 cups organic brown basmati rice
• 6 cups water
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons ghee
  A Pinch of Hingu

Add to the rice cooker, select the brown rice or whole grain setting, and let it cook.