Wheat Bran Cookies - Indian Health Recipes

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Preparations:

Take cardamoms in a mortar and pestle and powder them. Mix maida, wheat bran, baking soda and cardamom powder and keep this mixture aside. Take a rolling board and rolling pin and grease them. Take an aluminum cookie sheet or a heat proof glass plate and grease it. Preheat oven in convection mode at 190^oC.

Method:

Take unsalted butter which is at room temperature in a bowl. Cream butter and add powdered sugar. Mix well to get a creamy mixture. To this butter mixture add the prepared flour mixture and mix well. Add some water to bind it. Prepare smooth dough. Take the dough on to the rolling board and roll it with a rolling pin to desired thickness. Press cookie cutter into the rolled dough and cut out shapes. The portions which are left out after cutting with a cookie cutter can be binded together and rolled again. Arrange the cookies on the greased plate. Take care to keep at least one inch gap between each cookies as they will expand on baking. After arranging all the cookies prick them with a fork.

Place this baking plate ( I have used a glass Pizza plate) in the preheated oven and bake at 190^oC in convection mode for 25 minutes. Switch off the oven. If you observe here the cookies look under cooked as they feel soft when touched. And if you try to remove them they will get crumbled. So even after you finish baking, do not remove the baking plate from the oven, till the cookies cool completely. Even after switching off the oven, the heat in the oven allows the cookies to harden. Store the cooled cookies in a jar.

Points To Remember:

Store the powdered cardamoms in a closed jar till use to retain the fresh aroma.

Use unsalted butter for this recipe. Bring the butter to room temperature before starting the process. It is very important to use room temperature butter to make it creamy.

As we are using wheat bran the dough will have a crumbly texture. So we add water to make it into dough of rolling texture. Add water little by little. Water is added just to bind the dough.

Even when though the cookies are hardened and cooled the baking plate will be hot to touch. So do not forget to wear gloves while removing the baking plate from the oven.

Additional Points

Bran is rich in fiber. They have natural vitamins which the body can observe easily.

It is an observation that poor and labor class in South India, take coarse rice on which the bran is not removed completely. The more affluent families take polished rice which is white in color. In polishing the bran is removed completely.

Unpolished rice left in open attracts "Ants" easily. Ants do not prefer to eat polished rice because they know that there is no nutritional value left after polishing with removal of bran.

Paralysis strokes are comparatively more in Vegetarian families which eat polished rice without bran. Non-Vegetarians are able to cover up the nutritional loss through non-veg. items. People who eat parboiled rice are also less prone to paralysis because there is some bran left on this rice. We find paralysis is less prevalent in East India, where they eat parboiled rice, compared to South India, esp. Andhra Pradesh.

Eating rice with bran is difficult for most of the people. Thus we can artificially include it in our diet by adding a few spoons of bran to Dal and other Gravy preparations. Addition of bran enhances the taste as it brings a mild tinge of natural sweetness.

The cookies shown here are manufactured by many big companies and sold in the market with a high premium under different brand names. These biscuits are prescribed by doctors for patients who are under convalescence and recuperation.

So include wheat or rice bran to make healthy cookies for your family.

Bran is available from any rice mill in the rural vicinity. One should be careful to collect bran without sand and mud particles,

which can be done by requesting the miller. The millers collect bran and sell it for being fed to cattle.Bran is also available in some supermarket chains like "Spencers" in India.

Enjoy !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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