The Whole Grain Cookbook: Wheat, Barley, Oats, Rye, Amaranth, Spelt, Corn, Millet, Quinoa, and More

395 Pages·2013·44.82 MB·English

by  A. D. Livingston

THE
CELEBRATE THE GOOD EATING L
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V WHOLE GRAIN
TO BE HAD FROM WHOLE GRAINS! I
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Grain truly is the staff of life—tasty, versatile, and highly nutritious. This terrifi c
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and comprehensive cookbook offers authentic, eclectic homespun recipes that
showcase a variety of different grains at their best, whether on their own or cooked
with vegetables or meat. From the familiar oat to exotic ancient crops, The Whole
C O O K B O O K
Grain Cookbook celebrates the good eating offered by twenty different whole grains:
amaranth, quinoa, corn (maize), wheat, spelt, QK-77, triticale, rye, oats, rice, barley,
millet, teff, sorghum, fonio, buckwheat, chickpeas, beans and peas, seeds, and nuts.  
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Also included is information on how to store whole grains and how to grind your
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own meal and fl our with a home milling machine. (As with coffee and pepper, freshly
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ground grains are more fl avorful, and less expensive, than store-bought.) Appetizing,

informative, and uncomplicated, this is a resource you’ll return to again and again.    W
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A. D. LIVINGSTON, for years a regular columnist for Gray’s Sporting Journal, is L
the author of more than a dozen cookbooks, including Jerky; Cast-Iron Cooking; Cold- E

Smoking & Salt-Curing Meat, Fish, and Game; and The Curmudgeon’s Book of Skillet G
Cooking (all Lyons Press). He cooks, fi shes, hunts, and writes in Wewahitchka, Florida.
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N

WHEAT, BARLEY, OATS, RYE, AMARANTH,
C A. D. LIVINGSTON
O SPELT, CORN, MILLET, QUINOA, AND MORE
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K
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Lyons Press is an imprint of
Globe Pequot Press
Guilford, Connecticut
LyonsPress.com
Cover design by Nancy Freeborn
Front cover photos: top © Food Passionates Photography/Veer; LYONS
bottom left © viki2win/Veer; bottom center licensed by Shutterstock.com. PRESS
bottom right © Alloy Photography/Veer; back cover photo licensed by Shutterstock.com
The
Whole Grain

C o o k b o o k
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Other BOOks By A. D. LivingstOn
Cast-Iron Cooking
Cold-Smoking & Salt-Curing Meat, Fish, and Game
Complete Fish & Game Cookbook
The Curmudgeon's Book of Skillet Cooking
The Freshwater Fish Cookbook
Jerky
Sausage
Venison Cookbook
WholeGrainCkBk_Fnl.indd 2 2/20/13 11:07 AM
The
Whole Grain

C o o k b o o k
Wheat, Barley, Oats, Rye, Amaranth,
Spelt, Corn, Millet, Quinoa, and More
a. D. livinGston
Lyons Press
An imprint of Globe Pequot Press
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Copyright © 2000, 2013 by A. D. Livingston
second edition
ALL rights reserveD. no part of this book may be reproduced or transmit-
ted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be
expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. requests for permission should
be addressed to globe Pequot Press, Attn: rights and Permissions Department,
P.O. Box 480, guilford, Ct 06437.
A few of the recipes used in this book were adapted from the author’s cooking col-
umn in Gray’s Sporting Journal. Acknowledgments to other authors and books are
made in the text as appropriate.
Lyons Press is an imprint of globe Pequot Press.
text designer: Mary Ballachino
Layout artist: Melissa evarts
Project editor: ellen Urban
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
isBn 978-0-7627-8355-7
Printed in the United states of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
introduction .............................................vii
Part one: new World Grains
1. Amaranth .............................................3
2. Quinoa ..............................................11
3. Corn or Maize ........................................19
Part two: Grains of Gluten
4. Wheat ..............................................69
5. spelt ...............................................105
6. Qk-77..............................................113
7. triticale ............................................121
8. rye ................................................125
Part three: other World Grains
9. Oats ...............................................143
10. rice ...............................................159
11. Barley ..............................................207
12. Millet ..............................................231
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13. teff ................................................241
14. sorghum, Fonio, and Other Third Millennium grains .........247
Part Four: other Breadstuff
15. Buckwheat ..........................................253
16. Chickpeas ...........................................265
17. Beans and Peas .......................................281
18. seeds ...............................................293
19. nuts ...............................................307
20. Wild grist ..........................................335
Part Five: Mixing and Grinding seeds and Grains
21. ezekiel Mixes ........................................357
22. grinding your Own ...................................361
index ..................................................367
vi Contents
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introDuCtion
A column that I wrote for a few years ago drew favorable
Gray’s Sporting Journal
but skeptical response from surprised readers. The subject? Acorns—the staff of
life for ancient Europeans as well as Native Americans. The Indian connection
attracted the attention of a first-grade teacher in Blakely, Georgia, home of the
famous Kolomoki Indian Mounds and State Park. She sent me a few nice large
white-oak acorns along with some recipes from her students, who were studying
the ways and means of the Kolomoki.
in fact, the class put together an acorn cookbook in a blue-line mimeo-
graphed edition. i obtained a copy (one of my treasures) and found that many
of the recipes reflected culinary skepticism as well as imagination. For example,
a recipe for acorn soup called for 2 gallons of macaroni, 1 gallon of milk, 2 cups
of sugar and 1 acorn! Obviously, the little scholar responsible for this recipe
was none too fond of eating acorns in large numbers. indeed, the sparseness
of acorns and the abundance of macaroni in the ingredients list were typical of
most of the recipes.
The same sort of thing has happened in modern cookbooks for “whole
grain” breads and other foodstuffs. i’m looking at a recipe called Barley Loaf, for
example, that calls for almost 5 cups of all-purpose white flour, some cornmeal,
and only 3 tablespoons of barley flour! i won’t call the recipe dishonest (and it’s
probably a very good bread) but the title is, it seems to me, misleading, causing
me to suspect that it might well have been used to fill up an obligatory chapter
about barley in a modern cookbook. in any case, the result is, essentially, a white
wheat bread, not a barley bread as the name of the recipe implies.
i have tried to keep the acorn syndrome to a minimum in this book. As a
consequence, any reader who is looking for airy white breads is simply in the
wrong place. There are purely excellent books on the art of baking, often using
special flours for breads and pastries. My emphasis is on whole grain cookery,
which, in the case of bread for example, almost always yields a heavier, darker,
and sometimes harder result.
Wholeheartedly i acknowledge that such breads are usually more nutritious
than their white counterparts, but i must confess that my main interest in this
work is in good and sometimes adventurous eating. i also lean toward the old
vii
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recipes and ways, put together when our ancestors had no white flour and had to
grind their own from various grains and seeds. For these reasons, i often list in
the recipes such products as lard, bacon drippings, and butter. Culinarily, there is
no substitute for the brute flavor of bacon drippings, but i have tried, somewhat
reluctantly, to list substitutes for people who want to cut back on animal fat for
one reason or another.
The goodness of true whole grain cookery comes with one drawback—the
flours and meals are difficult to store for long periods of time. This is because
they contain the germ of the grain, which in turn contains a natural oil that
tends to turn rancid when crushed and released into the flour or meal.
Clearly, long shelf life is a highly desirable feature for large commercial mill-
ers, distributors, bakers, and retailers. it is also good for the consumer, who can
buy flours and meals that haven’t gone bad and can with reasonable care keep
them at home for some time. in order to supply the market with what they
thought consumers wanted, the large commercial millers entirely removed the
germ as well as the bran from wheat and corn before milling. As a result, modern
flours and meals are remarkably stable, making them very convenient for the
food industry and the consumer.
But this convenience is gained at the expense of flavor and the grain’s natu-
ral oil and nutrients, concentrated for the most part in the germ. removing the
bran robs the grain of much of its fiber and still more nutrients.
in recent years health-food stores and even some upscale supermarkets have
started stocking whole grains as well as whole grain meals and flours. in some
areas, small local mills—which often produce a purely excellent product—sell
their meals and flours either directly to the consumer or through local stores,
taking care to rotate the stock properly. The same stores have also started stock-
ing the whole grains, making them easy to obtain for grinding into meal or flour
at home with the aid of an inexpensive kitchen mill.
Although a kitchen grain mill is not necessary to the enjoyment of whole
kernel meals and flours, it is highly desirable simply because it enables the cook
to grind the grains on an as-needed basis. This pretty much solves the shelf life
problem because the grains, with germ intact, keep much better than the meal
or flour. Why? Because the germ is not crushed, holding in its natural oil and
nutrients until the moment of milling.
The wide availability of the whole grains for flours and meals also opens the
door to an ancient cookery that has never been fully realized in America and has
viii introduction
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been pretty much forgotten in modern europe: cooking with the whole grain,
which is much like cooking with rice. For that reason, many of the recipes in
this book are for cooking with not just the meal or flour but the whole grain, or
perhaps grits.
grits? yes. By definition this term applies to grains other than corn or to
cookery outside the American south. Because there is some confusion in word
usage, i’m setting forth below a short working guide to the terms commonly
used in milling and whole grain cookery.
What’s What
The diagram below shows a typical grain configuration. What is used in commer-
cial flour and meal is, for the most part, only the endosperm. Even some commer-
cial brown flour billed as “whole wheat” isn’t really made by grinding the whole
grain. I’ll cover this in more detail in chapter 4, Wheat.
HUSK
ENDOSPERM
GERM BRAN LAYERS
(large starchy part of the kernal)
Schematic of Wheat Kernel
Although this simplified drawing applies mainly to wheat, most other grains
have similar parts. The arrangement, however, may be quite different. Quinoa,
for example, has a tail-like germ that curls around the endosperm.
introduction ix
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