Sabja Seeds 200gm

Eight minutes to a clear halo

Drop sabja in water and it is ready before you have finished setting the table. Each seed swells into a translucent jelly sheath — you can watch it happen.

It is ready when every seed wears a clear halo. Never eat it dry; it swells fast and is uncomfortable if it does so on the way down.

Sabja is not chia

They get sold interchangeably and they are different plants doing different jobs.

Sabja is sweet basil seed, Ocimum basilicum, grown across India and Southeast Asia for centuries. Chia is Salvia hispanica, from Mexico and Guatemala.

The colour test settles it instantly: sabja is uniformly jet black. Chia is mottled — grey, brown, white and black speckled together. Anything sold as chia that is a single flat black is sabja.

Sabja also gels in eight minutes against chia's thirty.

What it carries

Around 1500mg of calcium per 100g — more than double chia's, and remarkable for a plant food. A tablespoon is roughly 180mg, comparable to half a glass of milk.

What it does not carry is omega-3. About 1g per 100g against chia's 18. If omega-3 is why you are buying a seed, this is not the one.

The cooling one

Ayurveda classes sabja as sheetal — cooling — and this is what Indian households actually use it for. Falooda in May is not a nutrition decision.

There is something real underneath: the mucilage holds a large volume of water and releases it slowly through the gut, which hydrates genuinely and is why it is commonly used for acidity and heartburn — the gel coats and buffers.

Using it

One to two teaspoons in a glass of water, eight to ten minutes. Lemon, or a spoon of gud, or rose syrup. Cold, in the afternoon, through summer.

Keeping it

Airtight and dark; twelve months. Fresh sabja smells faintly green and of very little else.