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Chickpea Snacks On The Way!

We are excited to share that we have been working on recipes to recreate Kara Sev (ref: wiki link). Sev is a spicy snack made from chickpea flour and chilli peppers. Kara Sev also is deep-fried in oil like many snacks from South India. Of course, our mission is to find a way to bake instead of deep frying. We have to do this while preserving the traditional taste.

Like other snacks in our product line, the main modification we need to make to bake instead of frying is to change the noodle-like shape to flat ribbons. Based on our trials, the ribbon shape gives the best result to cook it uniformly. Interestingly, for this chickpea snack, one of the traditional variations in the ribbon shape but still fried. That one is called Ribbon Pakoda.

chickpea snack recipe trial on a baking sheet

What you see above is our successful test recipe trial. Once we have created the product labels and are ready to post them on the website, they’ll be available for ordering. Follow us on Twitter/Facebook and know as soon as it’s ready to order.

Chickpea snacks are on the way. Be prepared to immerse yourself in the freshly prepared South Indian snacks!

Head to our products page to check out our other products.

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Shopping for healthy snacks? check these 3 key nutrients

You want to buy healthy snacks or food items during your shopping trip. But you’re intimidated by the long list in the nutrition label. We’re here to help. Pay attention to these three key nutrients to quickly filter out products you don’t want to buy.

  1. Fat
  2. Sugar
  3. Salt

Fat (especially trans and saturated fat), sugar and salt (sodium) are the first things you want to look at when you skim through the nutrition label. Though these 3 are important ingredients for taste, you want to make sure these are as low as possible.

We’re looking for the %DV or % Daily Value and portion size. Whatever is the portion size mentioned in the label, adjust for what you’d typically consume per day. For example, a chocolate bar may give nutrition information for ten squares. But if you usually eat no more than five squares a day, then divide everything by 2 to make sure it doesn’t exceed your daily goals.

Also, when shopping for a healthy snack, if you find two identical products from different brands, use these 3 key nutrients to decide which one to choose.

You still want to look at other nutrients on the label. But, most of the food items on the shelves of a grocery store have too much fat, sugar or sodium. So you can skip through these vast amounts of products and spend more time on the ones which are more suitable for your health requirements.

Check out our healthy snack products: click here.

Read more about the health effects of fat here: Health Canada.

Images by congerdesign, 955169 and Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

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Introducing Pumpkin Spice

During this beautiful Canadian fall season, we’re delighted to introduce the ‘Pumpkin Spice’ flavour in our line of South Indian Rice Chips. We’ve created this recipe with fresh pumpkin, turmeric powder and paprika. The snack is medium spicy and goes well with tea/coffee or your favourite meal.

Enjoy the goodness of natural flavours and let us know what you think in a review. As always, we make fresh batches every week and ship the orders from our freshest stock.

The fresh pumpkin adds a load of beta carotenes and turmeric and paprika add a bunch of natural anti-oxidants. We also bake the chips instead of frying to eliminate the harmful effects of frying and reduce oil.

Order it for yourself or gift it to a loved one this fall season and celebrate upcoming festivals, Halloween or Diwali. Follow this link and order your pack now: South Indian Rice Chips – Pumpkin Spice

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Our Vision

The idea for this food business came out of our search for healthy snacks. Every supermarket and every snacks aisle is filled with a huge amount of unhealthy options. They’re filled with sugar or saturated fat to make the snack tasty and more appealing to the customer. It’s not good for health.

However, in recent years there’s a growing number of companies that cater to healthy options. You can see more labels nowadays like ‘low-fat’, ‘no sugar, ‘zero fat’ and ‘plant based’ etc. While this is a welcoming sign, there is this other issue of packaging and ecological damage. Even the healthy snack companies pack their products in not eco-friendly packaging.

These are the 2 main concerns from which our idea is born.

We in Mrukku Bites aspire to provide healthy snack products in eco-friendly packaging.

That is our vision.

First, to pursue healthy options, we’re making our products only from plant-based ingredients. This itself steers us clear of a lot of saturated fats. Next, to tackle the fried snacks, we bake them instead so that the amount of oil used and absorbed is easily controllable.

Second, to pursue eco-friendly packaging, we’d like to ship the products as fresh as possible. Most of the snacks are packaged in plastic bags because they provide longer shelf life. This is an important property for the product to be displayed on a supermarket shelf. But, as we’re selling through our website and ship directly from our manufacturing facility, our products are not going to be sitting on a shelf for months. So, we can use regular paper bags which are compostable. Regular paper bags provide the necessary strength and sealing required for a short trip from our facility to your home.

These are not easy challenges. But that’s our mission to solve. Along this journey, we depend on our customers’ support and feedback to improve ourselves continuously and offer healthy and eco-friendly snack options.