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Samak Khichdi
Vrat / Fasting Main Course

Samak Khichdi

Vrat ki khichdi — barnyard millet, potato and roasted peanuts, no dal

सामा / व्रत के चावल (Sama / Vrat ke chawal) सांवा / झंगोरा (Sanwa / Jhangora) Bhagar / Varai (Marathi) Samo / Moriyo (Gujarati)
25 min + soak
Serves 2
Easy
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Samak khichdi is what most North Indian kitchens actually cook on a fast day, and it is a genuinely different dish from the khichdi you make the rest of the year. There is no dal in it, no onion or garlic, no turmeric, and the salt is sendha namak. What is left has to carry the meal on its own, which is why the potato and the peanuts matter more here than they would anywhere else.

Samak is barnyard millet — the same grain sold as sama, sanwa, jhangora, bhagar or vrat ke chawal depending on where you are — and it is the one millet that is traditionally allowed during vrat, because it is treated as a fasting food rather than as a cereal. It is also the fastest-cooking millet there is, which is the other reason it suits a fast day: from soaked grain to the table is about fifteen minutes.

Instructions

1

Soak the samak

Rinse the samak two or three times and soak it in plain water. Six to eight hours is the standard soak for whole millets on this site — see the millet cooking guide for the full chart — but samak is a very fine grain and 30 minutes genuinely helps if you are cooking at short notice on a fast day. Drain, and throw the soaking water away.

2

Roast the peanuts separately

Dry-roast the groundnuts on medium heat for 4–5 minutes, until the skins darken and start to loosen. Rub the skins off and crush them coarsely. Set aside. Peanuts cooked in the khichdi go soft and vanish into it; roasted and folded in at the end they stay crunchy, and on a day with no dal and no onion that texture is doing a lot of work.

3

Fry the potato in ghee

Heat the ghee in a pressure cooker or heavy pan. Add the cumin and let it splutter, then the green chilli and ginger for 30 seconds. Add the potato cubes and fry 3–4 minutes, until the edges look translucent and a few faces have caught colour. Sealing the potato first is what keeps the cubes recognisable instead of letting them melt into the millet.

4

Add the samak and water

Add the drained samak and stir for a minute so every grain is coated in ghee. Pour in the water and add sendha namak. Note that this is more water than our cooking chart gives for barnyard millet — the chart says 1:2 for soaked grain, because it is aiming at fluffy and separate. Khichdi is meant to be soft and spoonable, so 1:3 here is deliberate, not a typo.

5

Cook, and leave it alone

Pressure cook for 2 whistles on medium and let the pressure fall on its own, or simmer covered in an open pan for about 12 minutes. Do not stir while it cooks. Barnyard millet is the fastest-cooking millet and the most easily broken; stirring mid-cook releases starch and is the quickest route to a sticky pot.

6

Finish and serve

Open, fluff once with a fork, and fold in the crushed roasted peanuts, coriander and lemon juice. Serve hot, with vrat-friendly curd alongside if your fast allows it. If it has tightened while standing, a spoon of hot water brings it back.

Made with
Orggu Barnyard Millet (Unpolished) Farm-direct samak, nothing polished off
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Why samak is the vrat millet

Among the millets, samak is the exception. Foxtail, kodo, little and browntop millet, along with bajra, jowar and ragi, are treated as ordinary cereals and are generally avoided during vrat; samak is treated as a fasting food and is not. That is a matter of custom rather than botany — samak is a millet like the others — and practices differ from family to family, so follow the rules your own household keeps. Our guide to millets for Navratri fasting lays out which are considered vrat-friendly and which are not.

The name confuses people, and reasonably so. Vrat ke chawal means fasting rice, but samak is not rice at all. It picked up the name because the grains are tiny, pale and cook like broken rice. The other names for the same grain — sanwa and jhangora in the hills, bhagar and varai in Maharashtra, samo and moriyo in Gujarat, kuthiraivali in Tamil and oodalu in Kannada — are all in our millet names glossary.

Cooking-wise, samak is the quickest millet in the pantry: soaked, it is done in about twelve minutes, against fifteen for foxtail or kodo. It also takes less water than the others — 1:2 rather than 1:2.5 — which is worth remembering the rest of the year, when you are cooking it plain rather than as khichdi.

Pro Tips

Crush the peanuts coarsely, not to a powder. Half-crushed is what gives you both the crunch and the body.

Making it for a family? Scale the millet and water together, but keep the potato at one per two people or it stops being khichdi.

The lemon goes in at the end, off the heat. Cooked lemon juice turns flat and slightly bitter.

Same base, different dish: leave out the water-heavy khichdi ratio and cook it 1:2 instead, and you have samak pulao.

What is in a serving

From the 75 g of barnyard millet in each serving — the potato, peanuts and ghee add to this

225 Calories
4.7g Protein
7.6g Fibre
3.8mg Iron

Tap to learn more

Where those numbers come from — and what they leave out:

  • Unpolished barnyard millet carries about 300 kcal, 6.2 g protein, 10.1 g fibre and 5 mg iron per 100 g; the figures above are three quarters of that, for the 75 g in one serving
  • That fibre figure is the highest among the millets — see our barnyard millet guide for the full table
  • The potato, peanuts and ghee add calories and fat on top. We have no sourced figures for those on this site, so we have left them out rather than guess at a total
  • Barnyard millet sits in the low GI band, often cited around 41. That is a property of the grain, not a claim about a fasting diet — a khichdi cooked soft with potato behaves differently from plain cooked millet

Tap to flip back

Barnyard millet composition from the Indian Food Composition Tables (IFCT 2017), NIN / ICMR, as published on our barnyard millet guide. If you fast with a medical condition such as diabetes, or while pregnant, talk to your doctor about it rather than to a recipe page.

Did You Know?

Two of the other classic vrat staples are not grains at all. Kuttu is buckwheat, which is a seed from a plant related to rhubarb, and singhara is water chestnut flour. Samak is the odd one out on the fasting thali in the opposite direction — it genuinely is a cereal grain, a millet, and it is on the list anyway.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is samak khichdi allowed during Navratri vrat?

Samak is the one millet traditionally eaten during vrat, which is where the name vrat ke chawal comes from. The rest of this recipe follows the usual vrat conventions too — no dal, no onion or garlic, no turmeric, and rock salt instead of table salt. Fasting practices differ from family to family and between traditions, so follow the rules your own household keeps. Our Navratri fasting guide has the fuller picture.

Can I use another millet for vrat khichdi?

Generally not. Foxtail, kodo, little and browntop millet, along with bajra, jowar and ragi, are treated as regular grains by most traditions and are avoided during vrat — samak is the exception. If you want a khichdi for an ordinary day, our kodo millet khichdi uses dal, tomato and turmeric and is a different dish altogether.

Why sendha namak instead of regular salt?

Rock salt is the salt traditionally used during vrat because it is unprocessed. Worth knowing that this is custom rather than nutrition: rock salt, sea salt and table salt are all mostly sodium chloride and carry broadly the same sodium, so switching salt type does not make a dish lower in sodium. Our post on non-iodized salt goes into what actually differs between them.

Can I add moong dal to samak khichdi?

Not for a fasting khichdi — pulses are avoided during vrat in most traditions, which is exactly why this recipe leans on peanuts and potato for substance instead. On an ordinary day, a dal-based millet khichdi is a fine thing to make, and our kodo millet khichdi is built that way.

Why did my samak khichdi turn sticky?

Usually stirring. Barnyard millet is very fine and cooks in about twelve minutes, and stirring while it cooks breaks the grains and releases starch, which is what turns the pot gluey. Add the water, cover it, and leave it alone until it is done. Too much water does the same thing, so measure rather than pour by eye — and if you skipped the soak, add a little more time rather than more water.

Shop Ingredients

Orggu Barnyard Millet (Unpolished) Samak / vrat ke chawal, from small farmers
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Orggu Groundnuts Raw peanuts — roast them yourself
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Orggu Himalayan Rock Salt Sendha namak for vrat cooking
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Orggu Barnyard Millet Samak for your vrat khichdi
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