Grainy Picture
* Wheat: The world’s favorite grain because of its rich flavor and high content of gluten, which makes bread dough able to rise. Like oats, barley and rye, wheat belongs to the botanical family Festucoideae-- they’re all related to the common lawn grass fescue.
Modern wheats have naked seeds, but the earliest wheats were covered by a protective hull, which has to be removed before grinding. An ancient “hulled” wheat called spelt can be found at some natural foods stores.
Wheats are classified as “hard” (high-gluten) or “soft” (low-gluten). Hard wheats like durum make good pasta, while soft wheats are better for tender cakes and pastries. The usual bread wheat, Triticum vulgare x aestivum, is fairly soft, but a very soft wheat called club wheat (Tr. compactum) is grown especially for pastry-making.
Wheat can be bought as flour, raw whole wheat “berries” and bulgur. Bulgur is degerminated wheat grains that have been cooked, dried and crushed. It’s a sort of instant wheat which can even be eaten without cooking if you soak it until it softens.
* Couscous: This is not a grain but a grain-shaped cousin of pasta, made by sprinkling water into a bowl of flour and running your hand around the bowl in circles until granules form. These are sifted out and dried, then steamed. In North Africa couscous is often made from grains that lack gluten, such as corn and barley, but most couscous sold in this country is wheat.
* Rice: There may be more varieties of rice than of any other grain: long-grain, short-grain, aromatic, glutinous. Rice produces more food per acre than any other grain. At the same time, it also requires more labor than any other grain, which is why rice-producing countries are always densely populated.
Common rice has some less well known cousins. Dry rice (Oryza glaberrima) was domesticated in moderately arid parts of northern Africa, where it still grows wild. The more distantly related wild rice, on the other hand, requires so much water the traditional way of harvesting it is in a canoe.
* Maize: Corn--as we call maize--is notably less nutritious than wheat, but it has an attractive flavor and the available nutrition is increased if the seed coating is dissolved with lye. The result is known as hominy (usually made into porridge or grits). The hominy dough used in making tortillas is called masa. Corn comes in a spectacular range of varities (and colors), one of the most ancient of which is popping corn.
* Barley: This is one of the most ancient grains, more tolerant of cold weather and poor soil than wheat. It takes a relatively long time to cook, but it has an attractive, nutty flavor and is a good source of niacin, thiamine and potassium. The whole grain is usually processed into small round granules and sold as pearl barley.
* Rye: This grain, originally a weed in the wheatfields of Afghanistan, spread wherever wheat was being grown. It is insidiously similar to wheat and often farmers believe it’s a kind of wheat gone wrong. Although it lacks gluten, it has its own virtues--it ferments longer and more vigorously than wheat and develops an attractive grassy flavor of its own.
* Triticale: A modern hybrid of wheat and rye, triticale is sporadically available in health food stores. It possess a higher protein content and better amino acid balance than either of its parent grains. Whole triticale makes a delicious hot cereal served with honey and a little butter.
* Oats: The glamour grain of the ‘80s no longer obsesses people, but oats are still very nutritious and high in fiber. (The glamour status was ironic--oats were long known mainly as the subsistence diet of Scottish peasants and as horse fodder.) They can be added to bread or cookies, but porridge is still their main destiny.
* Millets: The minor grains grown here and there around the world are known as millets. They are all very nutritious but their strong, often slightly bitter, flavors long made them unfashionable. Today, of course, these unique flavors are part of their attraction.
The millet you’re most likely to find in a store is broomcorn millet, which gets its name because brooms are made from the straws on which the tiny, buff-colored seeds grow. Probably domesticated in Egypt, it is grown everywhere from Africa to India. It is rich in phosphorous, iron, calcium, riboflavin and niacin.
Job’s Tears, which can be found in some health food stores, is a native of Southeast Asia which has by now spread throughout the world’s tropics. Its bean-sized white seeds, which actually have a bean-like flavor, are the food of the poor in many countries.
Many other millets have local or historical importance--for instance, foxtail millet was the original basis of Chinese civilization, and the native grain of West Africa is fonio, related to our lawn crabgrass--but you’re only likely to find them in Indian markets.
Several originated in Africa. The most important is sorghum, also known as milo. It’s called dhura in the Near East, jowar in India and kaoliang in China. The very nutritious pearl or cattail millet is grown nearly everywhere in Africa south of the Sahara and is known in India as bajra. Finger millet, whose seeds grow on little spikes pointing every which way like fingers, grows wild in Ethiopia. In India it is known as ragi.
The smallest of all grains, only about twice the size of the period at the end of this sentence, is teff ; the name means “lost” in the Amharic language. Its flavor is preferred for the Ethiopian pancake-bread, injera. Probably this, rather than teff’s high calcium and iron content, is why half the farmland in Ethiopia is planted in teff.
* Pseudo-Cereals: Technically, grains are grass seeds, but there are several “pseudo-cereals.” The best known is buckwheat, related to rhubarb. Unroasted, crushed kernels are called buckwheat groats, and when roasted, known as “kasha.” Buckwheat contains all eight essential amino acids, both Vitamin E and B-complex vitamins and calcium. Buckwheat flour has a relatively high fat content so it shouldn’t be stored a long time or it will stale.
In recent years, health food stores have been featuring quinoa, a member of the same family as beets. The Incas, who called it kinua or kiwina , considered it a sacred plant. It’s one of the finest sources of protein in the vegetable kingdom and is rich in Vitamin E, phosphorus, calcium, iron, lysine and assorted B vitamins. Quinoa also has a less well known cousin, canihua, which can grow at even higher altitudes and is said not to have the earthy flavor of quinoa.
In ancient times, the seeds of plants of the amaranth family were harvested both in Mexico and Peru. It was a very important crop, particularly in Mexico, and it might still be important there if the Aztecs had not sometimes made a sort of cake of amaranth seed and blood from their human sacrifices. To the Conquistadores, this seemed an obscene, satanic parody of the Catholic Mass and they outlawed the plant. The variety of amaranth that was eaten in Peru is sometimes grown in gardens for its brilliant colors. It’s known as love-lies-bleeding.
Many other seeds are occasionally used like grains. Flax seed, for instance, and flaked soybeans, which may be cooked along with grains for additional protein.
