Denizens tease their taste buds with pakhala bhaat

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Bhubaneswar: A city restaurant organised pakhala festival on its premises, Wednesday. The month-long festival will continue till the month end at Sai Anand restaurant here.
Orissa POST spoke to some visitors and, foodies here and tried to fathom their excitement for this summer-time Odia cuisine.
Swati Dash, an engineering student, said, “The veg-pakhala or as we know as dahi-pakhala just makes your taste buds go crazy. Served with green chilli, ginger, coriander leaves, garlic, alu chakta (mashed potatoes), drumsticks fry, badi chura, neutia saga and parwal fry as side dishes, this meal is worth dying for.”
Paresh Sahu, a college student from Puri, who was serving his gastronomic needs on the non-veg variant said, “For the non-vegetarians, they have chingudi sukhua (dried shrimps), checha, fish fry and janhi chigundi rai along with the regular alu chakta and drumsticks fry.”
It may be worth mentioning here that the multi-cuisine restaurant serves both Odia and Bengali foods.
Known as pakhala bhaat in Odisha, fermented rice is a part of many South Asian cultures too. Traditionally, rice is cooked in the afternoon and excess water is drained. After the rice cools down to room temperature, it is soaked fully in water and stored in an earthen clay pot. This covered pot with soaked rice is left overnight at regular room temperature. The rice would ferment by the next morning and is eaten for breakfast. Traditionally, it is eaten with a side dish, raw onion or green chilli. Some prefer to drain excess water and eat it with yogurt and a slight sprinkle of salt. The lactic acid bacteria break down the anti-nutritional factors in rice resulting in an improved bioavailability of micro-nutrients and minerals such as iron, potassium and calcium by several thousand percentage points. For example, after 12 hours of fermentation of 100 grams of rice, the availability of iron changes from 3.4 mg to 73.91 mg; an increase of 2,073%.