What is Pej?

When rice is cooked slowly in excess water, the grain begins releasing part of itself into the pot. Bringing together minerals, starch, bran oils, softness and fragrance. The resulting broth is known across many parts of India as pej.

Warm, lightly viscous, and deeply restorative, pej has long been consumed alongside native rice varieties throughout forest, agrarian, and monsoon-growing communities. In some homes it is sipped before a meal with a pinch of salt. In others, it becomes the meal itself.

Traditionally, pej was valued during periods of recovery offering sustenance in a form that remained simple and easy for the body to receive.

The quality of pej changes with the grain itself.

Modern polished rice produces very little of it. Much of what once nourished the broth — bran, oils, fibre, minerals, and natural compounds within the grain — is removed during industrial polishing.

Native unpolished rice behaves differently.

As the grain cooks, the pej becomes fuller, cloudier, more aromatic, and more deeply satisfying. Red rice produces a darker, earthier broth. Aromatic varieties release softer fragrances of leaf, soil, grass, and rain.

The most nourishing pej comes from cooking the rice in the same water it was soaked in, allowing the grain to retain what it has already begun releasing.

Mahadi red rice, one of the native varieties we grow in the Western Ghats, produces a particularly deep and nourishing pej. Traditionally considered strengthening and restorative, the grain was also slow-cooked into porridges and broths across forest communities through the monsoon season. Mahadi pej was especially valued during pregnancy, postpartum recovery, digestive fatigue, and periods requiring deeper nourishment and strength.

At the farm, pej remains part of everyday life.

The broth is often strained from slowly cooked native rice and consumed warm before meals, especially during the monsoon and winter months when the body naturally begins seeking warmth, softness, and mineral-rich food.

Like many traditional foods, pej was never designed as a product.

It emerged quietly from the rhythms of cooking, cultivation, nourishment, and the simple instinct to waste very little from a grain that took an entire season to grow.

Today, as native rice varieties slowly disappear from fields and kitchens, pej disappears with them.

Yet within a cup of warm rice broth lives an entire agricultural memory: rain-fed fields, slow grain, woodsmoke, monsoon harvests, and the generations that learned nourishment from the land around them.