Great Grains: Barley, It’s for Soup and So Much More

Barley ready for harvest (USDA photo)

In researching foods for this blog, I’m ever amazed at the ancient and long-standing human ingenuity in adapting plants for our use.  Human history is largely the story of how we’ve overcome adversity, and found ways to survive. It is not coincidental, I think, that the foods I write about have been providing us sustenance for thousands of years. Nothing I write about was created yesterday in a laboratory. Could it be there is wisdom is in the tried and true?

Need I add that the ancient grain, barley, is very much in this tradition? It was the first domesticated grain to be grown in the Middle East and is the world’s fourth most widely grown cereal grain. It is commonly used as animal food and in the production of beer and whiskey.  In Korea it is often mixed with rice, and the Japanese drink an infusion of roasted barley called mugi cha, and use it in making miso. Saudi Arabians eat barley soup during Ramadan, and in Moslem tradition it is thought to sooth and calm the bowels. In the U.S., we most often see pearled barley, hulled barley which has been steamed to remove the bran. Some natural food stores sell hulled barley, the equivalent of brown rice, with only the inedible, fibrous hull removed.  Hulled barley can be used like pearled barley, only it needs a longer cooking time.  Most any rice recipe can adapted to barley, allowing for barley’s more chewy texture.  When long-cooked it will break down and add a creamy thickness to whatever liquid it is cooked in. Barley is also sometimes sold as flour, flakes or grits, and often I use malted barley syrup as a sweetener in desserts.  My recipe uses hulled or pearled barley in a traditional way: in a soup with mushrooms, but of course, there is a twist (recipe after the jump).

Red lentil-shiitake mushroom-barley soup (recipe after the jump)

Look What I Found Today at Costco!

I bought this today at Costco–and for a very fair price (just over $13 for a 12-pound bag). Because I do catering for groups on retreat, I find Costco, the membership big-box store, very useful. They carry a wide range of decent quality food in large sizes, and at very competitive prices. Naturally, I wish they’d carry more organics, so when I spot an organic product I can use, I make sure to buy it.  But seeing Lundberg rice, really stopped me in my tracks.  For generations, Sacramento Valley-based Lundberg Family Farms has been the leading grower and marketer of organic rice and rice products in North America, and the standard against which all others are measured. Their rice cakes, for example, are so much better than the rest, they are really the only ones worth buying. While they are now a successful business with some 200 employees and 17,000 acres of rice under cultivation, when they started growing organic rice decades ago, it was a risky business on which almost no one else wanted to gamble. For upholding high standards, for continuing to be family-owned,  and for making their superior foods widely available, I salute Lundberg Farms. If whole, organic foods are ever to make it onto a majority of America’s tables, they will have to be reasonably priced and much more widely distributed. Finding Lundberg’s rice at Costco gives me hope in both regards. I thank both companies, and hope this is not a one-shot deal, but a sign of the acceptance of high quality, whole foods in a mass market setting.

Quinoa: The Inca’s Mother of all Grains Comes to Your Home Kitchen

Quinoa in flower (photo by Christian Guthier via Flickr)

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Most of you already know, it’s pronounced KEEN-Wah, grows in the Andes, and is high in protein.  What didn’t you know? Did you know that quinoa has been cultivated for some 6,000 years, that the Incas considered it “the mother of all grains,” and that Peru and Bolivia are still the world’s leading producers? In the past twenty five years quinoa has come from being almost unknown in North America to being almost mainstream (I’ve bought organic quinoa at Costco). I attribute that in part to our obsession with protein–quinoa contains all the essential amino acids, and is 12-18% protein.  It’s also a source of phosphorus, magnesium and iron, and is gluten free. Additionally, it’s quick cooking and easy to eat. In short, I predict a brilliant future for quinoa in North America. It’s major downside, that it is naturally coated with a bitter and slightly toxic substance called saponin, has mostly been eliminated by thorough washing before being marketed.  Still, a good rinse before cooking is usually advised.  Most commonly, quinoa is cooked like rice: two parts water to one part quinoa, bring to a boil, cover, turn down to a slow simmer and simmer for about twenty minutes. When cooked, the grains open up and acquire a tiny, white ring around them. Well-stocked natural food stores sell quinoa flakes and flour as well as the whole grain. You will happily eat quinoa as a simple cooked grain, or with a sauce, but if you want to dress it up a little, try my recipe for Quinoa-Potato Sauté with a garnish of toasted pumpkin seeds (a marriage of three Latin American natives) …

Great Grains: Millet, Ancient Grain Ready to be Discovered Again

Millet grains washed, draining in a colander, ready to cook

Not many of the foods we eat have as ancient and proud a history as millet, the small seeds of grasses which have been cultivated for some ten thousand years. In fact, millet predates rice as a staple food in China and is mentioned in a recipe for bread in the 4th chapter of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, and the French, who know a thing or two about food, were eating it long before the Roman legions arrived. Even today millet is eaten from China and Japan, through India and into Africa and Europe. Russians eat it as a sweet porridge with sugar and milk, the Chinese as a savory porridge with beans or sweet potatoes. How sad that it is known in the U.S. mostly as bird food (not sad for our birds, I might add).

Traditional Chinese medicine recommends millet for problems of blood sugar and the pancreas.  Western science notes that it is 11% protein, high in B vitamins, folic acid, calcium, iron, potassium, and is gluten free. Some sources believe that millet is the one grain which has an alkalizing effect on our body.

So, how to use millet? Serve it as a grain in place or rice, or potatoes. Add it to soups as you would barley. Make croquettes. Cook it soft and eat as a morning cereal. Cook up a pot and you’ll see how versatile it is. My recipe for Sweet Corn-Millet Croquettes is here. Millet cooking instructions after the jump…