Ragi flour (finger millet)
Part used: seed
Fine, reddish-brown flour milled from the whole ragi grain, bran and all — ragi is never polished. Earthy, faintly sweet, slightly gritty. It is the flour of sangati, ragi roti, ragi java (porridge) and ragi malt, and it thickens as it cooks in a way wheat flour does not: a thin slurry becomes a firm mass in minutes. Buy from a mill with turnover, or mill whole ragi at home; the bran oil turns rancid in old flour and the smell tells you.
Storage
Airtight jar, cool and dark, one month; in the fridge, three months. Whole ragi grain keeps for years — mill as you go if you can.
Substitutes
Jowar (sorghum) flour makes a paler sangati in the same way. Nothing else behaves like ragi in java or malt.
Benefits
- Well-studied· 2 sources
Ragi is the richest common cereal in calcium — about 364 mg per 100 g, roughly ten times that of rice or wheat.
This is a measured fact about the grain, not a claim about what it does in the body. The ICMR-NIN Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 report 364 mg calcium per 100 g of whole ragi; the Devi et al. review puts it at 344 mg and calls it the highest among cereals. Both agree it is far above rice (about 7 mg) and wheat.
What has *not* been shown: that eating ragi improves bone density or prevents fractures. No human trial has tested that. Calcium from ragi also comes with phytate and fibre, which reduce how much is absorbed, so 364 mg on the table is not 364 mg in the bone. The honest version: a daily sangati or java is a meaningful, traditional source of dietary calcium in a diet that may have little milk. That is all we claim.
This is shared knowledge from tradition and research, not medical advice. Talk to your doctor before using any food to treat a condition.