The Whole Grain and Nothing but the Grain

This is the trilling conclusion to last month’s article about grains.

I hope you all haven’t been holding your breath, waiting for the answer to the mystery I left you with a month ago. I really intended to let you in on the secret two weeks ago but I was called away to the Monastery in Cottonwood to have a glorious weekend with my friends and figured you could wait.

As you may recall, I left off my last article with a cliffhanger, the unanswered question of why, if it’s so unhealthy, do we refine much of the grains we eat. The answer is pretty straightforward, but lengthy, and I should have told you then but I had exceeded my word count. Plus I wanted to pique your interest so you would come back and read more of the interesting stuff I had learned about grains that definitely wasn’t going to fit in the previous article.

First, the reasons why we refine so much of the grains we eat:

Refined grains are prettier. Humans prefer their food white and not brown. The reason we still want our food white is not clear. Historically, white food was very expensive so only the rich could afford it and everyone else coveted it. White also symbolizes purity and I guess it’s easier to spot contaminants in white food than it is in brown food.

Refined grains cook faster. Removing the outer seed coat, whose purpose in life is to regulate the passage of water into the seed so that it germinates but doesn’t drown, makes the seed cook much faster. This is well illustrated in the cooking times of brown versus white rice; white rice takes half the time to cook.

Refining also extends the shelf life of grains. Most of the fats in grain are stored in the germ and aleurone layer (which I know you remember from last month is the layer just under the seed coat). Removing these reduces the risk that the fats will oxidize and become rancid, allowing for much longer storage times.

And lastly, refined grains are easier to chew and easier to digest. Maybe too easy. Refined grains are almost all starch. The vitamins, minerals, fiber and enzymes have been removed. During digestion, all this starch is converted to sugar, which quickly raises blood sugar levels and may contribute to increased risk of diabetes.

I’m not sure any of these reasons is good enough to make up for the lack of nutritional value in refined grains. You can always pretty up brown grains with bright colored vegetables. You can cut down on cooking time by planning ahead and soaking your grains overnight. Modern refrigeration takes care of storage issues. And you’re probably better off chewing your food longer and dealing with a bit of flatulence than eating a bunch of empty calories.

Besides, there are way more interesting whole grains than there are refined grains.

Take wheat for example.

There is the most ancient form called Einkorn. It has two chromosomes and has a flowing form of gluten that makes it sticky. It’s great for porridge but not so good for bread.

When Einkorn crossed with a wild goat grass about a million years ago, it led to various species of four chromosome wheat including Emmer (also known as Farro), and Durum. Durum is still one of the most important species of wheat and is used to make bread, bulgur, and couscous. If you want to eat local Durum wheat you could try Kamut, which is a registered name for a variety of Durum that originated in Egypt but was developed in Fort Benton, Montana.

Then about 8000 years ago, a four chromosome wheat crossed with goat grass again and yielded a bunch of six chromosome wheats that include modern bread wheats, and Spelt.

All of these varieties of wheat are available in their whole grain form (only bread wheat is readily available in a refined form).

If you think that’s a lot of different kinds of wheat, it’s nothing compared to the diversities in rice. There may be as many as 100,000 different varieties of rice in the world.

There are four major categories of rice: Indica, Japonica, Aromatic and Glutinous. Within these categories the size, shape and color range from tiny, thin, blond grains to fat, short black grains with pink, purple, red and green colors in between. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, since we might not have time to try any other grains), we don’t have access to all 100,000 in the US but there is still a wide selection to choose from (I especially recommend trying forbidden black rice, it’s delicious and beautiful).

While corn, the last of the big three grains, does have lots of unrefined varieties, in this country we feed almost half of what we grow to animals (5.25 billion bushels in 2008 as compared to feeding only 325 million bushels to humans) and it’s mostly one variety.

I’ll just skip over corn and move on to the lesser known but no less delicious minor grains.

Amaranth, buckwheat, millet, quinoa, sorghum and teff are not widely eaten or available in the US. When they are available they are not refined and therefore can make an interesting addition to your whole grain repertoire.

My favorite of the bunch is quinoa, which cooks as fast as white rice and can be used anywhere you would use rice. It’s high in protein, cool looking, and quite tasty. All of them are worth trying and are a great way to get yourself out of a grain cooking rut.

I could go on and on about grains (and you may, at this point think I already have) but instead I’ll leave it to you to do more exploring and next month I’ll talk about making organic Twinkies instead.


Millet Patties
Makes 6-8 patties

If you've tried millet before and been disappointed, give these patties a try. They will change your mind. They did mine.

1 c. millet
3 T. olive oil, divided
2 c. water
1 T. minced garlic
¼ c. finely chopped red pepper
2 T. finely chopped green onion
¼ c. peanut butter
1 T. soy sauce
2-3 dashes of Brother Bru Bru (other hot sauces will suffice but the Brother is the best)
1 T. chopped pickled ginger

Heat a small saucepan with a tight fitting lid over medium-high heat. Add the millet and stir constantly until it is lightly toasted and fragrant. Add 1 teaspoon olive oil and the water. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, add the chopped garlic, and cover. Simmer for 20 minutes until the millet is soft and somewhat creamy. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

Place still warm millet in a bowl and add the peanut butter. Stir to combine. Add the pepper, green onion, soy sauce, hot sauce and pickled ginger.

Heat the remaining olive oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. Form the millet mixture into 3” patties, about ½” thick. Saute the patties, browning them well on both sides. Serve immediately.

Serve straight up or as a substitute for a burger patty or like falafel with a tangy sauce.

Pips and Particles

This weekend, for the first time this year, it felt like spring might actually arrive. Two whole days of relative warmth and sunshine can convince the most frozen and winter weary among us. Even the daffodils are starting to poke their heads out of the ground in anticipation.

However, for me, the most conclusive evidence of all that spring might be near is that stores are starting to sell gardening seeds. Having worked in the retail world for almost 20 years now, I have this Pavlovian response when I see the UPS man bringing boxes of seeds into the store. My spirits lift, the color green flashes before my eyes and I have an overwhelming desire to make an appointment at the bike shop for a tune up.

It’s no wonder that the sight of seeds provokes such strong emotions. Civilization owes its existence to these tiny bundles of new life. It was at least 10,000 years ago when humans first discovered that they could save the seeds of wild plants over the winter then plant them in anywhere they chose.

This small discovery has led to amazing changes. Settlements developed when humans no longer needed to move around to find food, but instead needed to stay put to tend their crops. When one person could grow the food for many, it freed up time to create art and to fight battles. Writing and arithmetic were invented to deal with the accounting of this excess food. Animals were domesticated since it was now possible to feed them as well.

Unfortunately, all the changes weren’t positive. Wars were probably invented not long after agriculture, since now rulers could afford to feed their troops. New diseases sprang up from people living in close quarters. Diets were greatly simplified from the previous variety of the hunter-gather, which led to deficiency and poor health (something we’re still trying to overcome).

You probably remember a lot of this from high school history class, but have you ever stopped to think about what an incredible thing a seed is. Seeds are like miniature space ships for the next generation of a plant. Everything the plant needs to survive its journey from parent to adolescence is contained inside the seed coat: the embryo of the plant, a good-sized food supply, and protection from the elements and predators.

And lucky for us, some of these seeds are also tasty and nutritious. Grains, legumes, and nuts are the groups of seeds we eat the most.

And eat them we do. Seeds provide the bulk of calories for the 7 billion humans currently on the planet (and the cynic in me thinks that seeds, or more specifically agricultural, is probably the reason there are so damned many of us). Worldwide, we grow and consume over 600 metric tons per year of rice alone.

Of the three groups of edible seeds, grains (the seeds of grasses) play the most dominant role in our diet (and is really what I intended to talk about in this article before I got all distracted by history and space ships). Wheat, rice and corn form the bulk of the diets for most people on earth (in the States, we prefer to feed it all to animals first and then eat the animals but that’s a topic for a different article).

These three grains were also the first grains to be domesticated. Wheat was developed in the Fertile Crescent around the same time that rice was being developed in China; as long as 12,000 years ago. Corn is a relative newcomer to the domestic grass scene and first appears in South and Central America around 6,000 years ago (although there is still much controversy about the exact time and place of corn’s origin).

The structure of all grains is similar. There is the outside seed coat which is there to protect the embryo and regulate the amount of water allowed to pass inside the seed. It is the seed coat that is removed when grains are refined. This makes the grains whiter and quicker cooking, since water can now easily pass through the grain.

However, the layer below the seed coat, the aleurone layer, is also removed when grains are refined. This thin layer (only one to four cells thick) is where all the good stuff is. It’s high in oil, minerals, protein, vitamins, and flavor.

Below the aleurone layer is the bulk of the grain, the endosperm. This is the food storage area for the embryo. It is composed of mostly starch in a matrix of protein. The closer you get to the center of this mass, the more starch there is and the less protein. So the more refined a grain is, the less nutritional value it contains.

Last but not least is the embryo, or germ. The embryo is located close to the outer wall of the seed so it can easily emerge and start growing a new plant when the conditions are right. The germ is rich in oils, enzymes and flavor. But, alas, is also lost in refinement.

Refining grains has given us white bread and white rice. But it’s also given us the disease beriberi; the result of a diet that relies too heavily on refined rice, which lacks thiamine. Refining robs us of most of the fiber, oil and B vitamins in the whole grain and leaves us with mostly starch.

So why do we refine grains? That’s a good question. Stay tuned in two weeks to find out the answer.
To Be Continued…


Sprouted Wheat Berries

1/3 c Whole Wheat Berries
1-Quart Glass Jar
Cheesecloth or sprouting lid

Soak the wheat berries overnight in 1 quart of tepid water. In the morning, rinse the berries in tepid water and drain completely (save the soaking water for your plants, they’ll love you for it). Place the rinsed berries in the jar. To make draining and rinsing the seeds easier, place a piece of cheesecloth over the jar and secure with a rubber band or a metal ring. If you have a sprouting screen, you can use that as well. Place the jar in a dark place, like a cupboard or pantry.
Rinse and drain the seeds twice a day for two days. They should be sprouting by then. Place them in cold water and gently separate them. You will want to use them right away, since this is when they are at their nutritional peak. They can be stored in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator for a couple of days.
You can eat them in salads or bake them into bread or throw them into a hot vegetable dish during the last moments of cooking. They are sweet and nurishing