Millet gongura rice | Rosella leaves rice with millet

Healthy and easy gongura rice recipe with detailed steps and pictures.

Gongura pulihora is a traditional Andhra recipe that is made with gongura leaves (called as rosella leaves). Gongura leaves are sour in taste and are a good source of iron, folate, and antioxidants. Usually, these leaves are used to make chutney called gongura pacchadi, another very famous Andhra delicacy.

Pulihora is a common south Indian rice dish made with rice and any souring agent like tamarind or lemon or raw mango. As these leaves impart tart flavor in the dish, we use theses leaves also to make the pulihora.

This is an easy recipe and you can make it quickly if you have cooked rice or millet handy. And this recipe is a good option to use leftover rice or millet.

For this recipe, rice or millet should be cooked fluffy. I have a detailed post on how to cook fluffy millet, please check if you are making this recipe with millet.

Recipe Notes and variations:

• I have added peanuts to this recipe as traditional pulihora recipe will have it. You can skip these to make this recipe as nut-free.
• There will be two types of roselle leaves – green and red. The red variety will be more tart and I have used homegrown red roselle leaves. But you can use green ones also to make this recipe.
• Adjust the roselle leaves according to your preference. If you do not like sour tasting foods, try reducing roselle leaves and you can add spinach leaves or coriander leaves or mint leaves also in this recipe.
• In this recipe, I have used cooked millet rice instead of regular rice but you can make this roselle leaves rice using regular rice or basmati rice or even with quinoa (make sure that cooked quinoa is fluffy).
• Cooked roselle leaves mixture can be refrigerated for a couple of days in the refrigerator and can be frozen for a month for later use.

Let’s make gongura pulihora recipe:

• Cook the millet or rice and cool it completely.
• Take the roselle leaves, fenugreek seeds, cumin seeds, mustard seeds and green chili in a mixer jar.
• Grind it into a smooth paste using little water. I used about 1/4 cup of water.
• Now take a pan, heat it, and add oil. Once the oil gets heated add cumin seeds, mustard seeds, red chili, and peanuts.
• Let the peanuts fry for a couple of minutes and then add urad dal, chana dal. Let all these fry till they turn golden brown.

• We usually like the crunchy dal and groundnuts, so I take these aside into a bowl and add ground gongura mixture to the remaining oil. This is optional and you can add the mixture to the tadka as well.
• Add some water (around 2 or 3 tbsp) to the mixer jar, shake it well, and add it to the pan.
• Let the mixture cook on a medium flame for 5 minutes. Add turmeric powder and salt to this mixture.
• After cooking for a couple of more minutes, you will see that oil is oozing out of the mixture. Switch off the flame once the oil oozes out. For me, it took around 6-7 minutes.

• At this stage, you can store the cooked gongura mixture in the refrigerator for later use. When you want to make the recipe, just take out this gongura mixture and add to cooked rice or millet, put the tadka.
• Add cooked millet, tadka to the gongura mixture, and mix it very well. Adjust salt if required.
• Gongura rice is ready to serve! This will be a very filling and nutritious breakfast or lunch. You can even have it for dinner.

You might also like other millet recipes on this blog, do check them out…

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Millet gongura rice recipe: