Flours & Powders

Flour is one of those quiet ingredients that decides more about a dish than we credit it for. The difference between a rustic Karnataka ragi mudde and a smooth Punjabi paratha is, before anything else, a difference in the flour — how the grain was grown, how it was milled, how long ago it was ground, and whether it was allowed to keep its bran. This shelf is built around that idea.

Every flour in this collection is stone-cold-milled in small batches from single-origin whole grains. Cold milling — where the stones run slow enough that the flour never crosses 40°C — matters because it preserves the germ, the bran, and the natural oils that determine the aroma and the nutrition of the final flour. Roller-milled supermarket atta, by contrast, runs at a temperature that oxidises those oils within minutes; you can smell the difference the moment you open a bag of each.

Our ragi hittu comes from a farmer collective near Ramanagara. Our foxtail and little millet flours are milled from grain grown in North Karnataka and Andhra. Jowar and bajra come from the drylands of the Deccan, wheat from unhybridised khapli and sonamoti varieties in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Everything is unbleached — we don't use benzoyl peroxide, ADA, or any of the chemical whiteners the modern flour industry relies on. What you see is the natural colour of the grain.

Because these flours are alive, they are also perishable. Cold-milled ragi hittu, in particular, is best used within a month of milling; store it in an airtight jar in the fridge if you buy in bulk. Explore below — every flour on this page was milled within the last two weeks.