Red, Green, and White Rice – East Indian Tricolor Rice

A more colorful version of the jeera rice or jeera fried rice, the East Indian tricolor rice is pink/red, green, and white in color. Fragrant and tasty, it’s often eaten for Christmas and other festive occasions!

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When you add color to the Indian Jeera rice, you get the beautiful-looking tricolor rice. Often only seen at weddings, festive occasions and sometimes at events, this fragrant and colorful traditional rice definitely adds a splash of color to your plate.

Don’t forget to stock the rice congee (the water drained from the rice) to make your hair shiny and give it volume.

What Ingredients do you need to Make Tricolor Rice?

To make a pulao of colored rice or, you’ll need some good quality basmati rice or long-grain white rice. Of course, you can always use regular white rice too. Other ingredients are jeera, coriander leaves, salt, food color, and water. Anise or bay leaves can be used to add flavor to the rice, but are not essential.

How to make Tri Colored Rice?

Cook the Rice and Add the Jeera Tadka

You can use a fluffy long-grain rice such as Basmati rice or Charminar rice. If you’re okay with it, any other good white rice works too.

Cook the rice like you would any normal rice, then make the jeera tadka and add to the rice. The tadka is made by simply adding oil or ghee and jeera (cumin seeds) to a small tadka pan or frying pan and cooking till it starts sputtering. Once ready, this mix is added to the rice and mixed gently with a fork.

The cumin gives the rice a really fragrant aroma, but it’s not an essential part of making colored rice. You can skip the tadka process.

Color the Rice

Separate the cooked rice into three parts. Add a few drops of green color to one part and red color to another part. Use a fork to mix. Don’t use a spoon, or the rice will break.

You can then either mix all the rice together; or line the rice in different colors on a platter and serve. You can sprinkle with some chopped parsley if you like.

Cooking Tips Or Tricks

• Add some bay leaves to the water while boiling rice for more flavor.
• Don’t worry if it seems like the salt used is extra. It gets drained out with the excess water. So your rice is left with just a little salt. 
• You can also add peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, cloves, or chopped green chilies to the cumin after a minute of frying, but this is optional.
• Other rice recipes you might like, are plain jeera rice, onion and cumin rice with coriander, simple white rice, burnt onion rice, turmeric rice, wedding rice, or this other recipe for plain coriander rice.
• You might also love all these rice desserts – white choc with raisins and puffed rice, dark choc with raisins and puffed rice, dark choc and coconut in puffed rice, or rice noodles called letri!

What to serve with Pink Green White fried rice?

This East Indian colored rice goes well with almost everything, but it’s usually served for Christmas or festive occasions along with spicy vindaloo, sorpotel, mutton or chicken khudi, chicken roast, duck moile, or tongue roast, and much more.

Other Recipes You Might Like

• Semolina Date and Orange Cake
• Sweet Tangy Mango Chutney
• Fried Brinjal Snacks
• Chicken curry with pineapple
• Lonvas of Mutton Curry