Picnic Yogurt(Curd) Rice

Easy and lite on stomach, great for digestion, aromatic, tangy, served at room temp and loved by kids and grown-up alike. I don't have enough words in praise for these easy and scrumptious curried yogurt rice.

Yogurt Rice are very popular in South Indian Cuisine, famous by name of Curd Rice. In India, we often refer to plain yogurt as curd, hence Curd Rice! South Indian cuisine offers a lot of variety of recipes with rice and this one is the easiest of all. And healthy too!

The cooling nature of plain yogurt and easy digestive nature of rice makes Curd Rice a perfect food to eat on the go. It is lite on stomach and taste best when consumed at room temperature.

Tell me? What are the basic requirements from a To-Go food?

In my books, I will prefer a to-go food that is -

1) Lite and Easy to digest.
2) Easy to cook, preferably a night before!
3) Easy to pack, less spillage the better.
4) And Don't require re-heating. 

Amazingly, curd rice fit perfectly all four requirements, making'em a must-have and preferred choice for Picnic or To-Go menu.

We recently went to Vegas for short trip and I made a lunch-box full of Curd Rice, some wraps  and packed fruits to eat on-the-go. We ate some fruits and wraps on the way and rice just not felt hungry to eat. We knew, rice will stay longest of all three! So, we finished everything but rice.

Initially, I felt, why did I waste time in making rice :( They might end up in trash lying in Hotel Fridge since Vishal will refuse to eat'em after a day even though Curd Rice stay good for up-to 2 days. Trash situation never reached since we were in our default roaming mode. You know!! When enjoying in Vegas, no-one remembers to eat on time!!

This lunch box full of Curd Rice really proved very helpful indeed. As usual, we were late in finding us dinner and by the time we planned to eat, almost all eating-joints were either closed or were not offering any food of our choice. We returned back to our hotel room, called in-room service and there kitchen was closed as well! At-last we decided to take Curd Rice out from refrigerator. Let'em come to room temperature and jumped to eat like hungry kings!

Let me sum-up these scrumptious Yogurt Rice for you again:

1) Loaded with Pro-bio-tics from yogurt.
2) Delicious on-its-own with nice & mild curry spice flavors. 
3) Gluten Free and can be made Vegan if you replace yogurt with Vegan Almond/Cashew Yogurt.
4) Perfect to pack to-go and ready in no time!
5) Can be made with leftover or day old cooked rice.

Traditional Curd(Yogurt) Rice

These rice are a little different from Traditional South Indian Curd Rice. The thing that differ here is tempering ingredients. For tempering ingredients, traditionally two kinds of lentils (Split Chana Daal and Toor Daal) are soaked in water for 1 hr or so and then added while making tampering oil. I often don't use these lentils due lack of time to pre-soak'em and also Vishal sometimes don't like'em in the food. So feel free to use'em if you want to. But I have to tell you that Curd Rice taste delicious even without them.

We loved every spoon of it after a long tiring day! A full day out of home yet yummy and homemade food to eat. What else does ChefDeHome need?

Enjoy!!