Indian Grinding Bowls (Chakki)

Our buyers travel the world to find furniture and accessories to enhance your home. With each journey, they bring back items with an interesting background story.

In this month’s ‘Story Of..’, we want to tell you more about our Grinding Bowls. Read more below.

Origin

Fabulously decorative and useful Indian grinding bowl, originally used to grind flour to make traditional Indian breads such as naan or chapatti. Superb as a coffee table, magazine tray, or indoor planter.

The grinding table or Chakki is made from wood with hand-carved detailing around the sides. It will bring an ethnic and authentic touch to your interior.

The word Chakki derives from traditional Indian grinding wheat between two stone plates. This is still used in some parts of rural India.

These tables are commonplace in Indian village households and are used for grinding spices and flour.

History

In the old times, almost every house in several parts of India had a flour mill or an atta chakki. Grains like wheat, maize, and pearl millet would be ground fresh each day. All women in the family would take part in this daily ritual to ensure that healthy rotis could be served to everyone. The graining was fixed on a slightly raised platform in an airy but windowless room at the back of the house.

How does a flour mill work?

Closeup shot of ancient Indian stone mill.

The top stone had a rectangular piece of wood (galua) fixed at the center in which a metal rod (attached to the stone at the bottom) was adjusted to provide the pivot for stones to move over each other. Grains would be poured from the top and a fancy wood-carved handle — placed on the top — was used to turn the top stone clockwise to make flour.

The bigger the stone, the faster the process and the finer the flour. However, the fact that it has to be turned by hand is a limiting factor. Usually, the diameter of the stone is less than the length of a person’s arm. Two persons can sit facing each other and move the chakki handle together to ease the work. The processed atta falls off the lower stone into the bhir — a circular receptacle below the chakki, which is made of mud and coated with multani mitti (Fuller’s earth).

The flour prepared through this method is healthier, unlike machine-ground flour and it does not heat up during the grinding process.

Small grinding tables – the usage

A smaller version of the chakki, which could be moved around the house, is called chakula and is used to prepare daliya from a variety of grains and for splitting the whole pulse into the dal. The smaller diameter of the stones ensured the grain was only broken, not turned to flour. It was religiously washed before the fasting season to grind kuttu (buckwheat) and sendha namak (Himalayan pink salt).

These semi-processed products are part of Uttar Pradesh’s cuisine. While wheat daliya is quite common, daliya can also be prepared from makki (maize), bajra (pearl millet), and jowar (sorghum).

The chakula can be adjusted to process pulses so that each grain breaks into two pieces, but the manual process is crude and sometimes the seed shatters into many pieces, and sometimes, it passes through unharmed. It all depends on the expertise of the person who adjusts the chakula and it is not good to get too much of either.

The shattered pieces are called chuni and have pieces of the seed coats which add to the nutrition. Chuni is soaked in water and then wheat flour is added to make it into a dough from which nutritious rotis or crisp parathas can be prepared (see recipe). Just like split pulses, chuni can be stored to be used later.

The home-processed dals are unpolished and though unpolished dals are easily available in the market now at a premium price, these are processed by machines only.

Health benefits

Daliya and chuni provide healthy choices along with some wholesome exercise. Working the chakki is often prescribed to pregnant women to ease childbirth. Chakki chalanasana is part of yoga with improves spine health and reduces backache. It also helps reduce belly fat and is a good alternative to going to the gym.

Unfortunately, chakki has now become synonymous with serving a jail term as prisoners are mandated to make flour.