Flour, Part 3

How and When To Be Your Own Doctor
by Dr. Isabelle A. Mose, Steve Solomon

(Page 18 of 28)

Keep on the high heat until the water again boils vigorously. Suddenly, the mixture will begin rising in the pot and will try to pour all over the stove. This means it is all at boiling temperature again. Quickly move the pot to the low burner; that instantly stops the frothing. Then cover. Let the porridge cook for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice to prevent sticking. Then, keeping it covered, turn off the heat. They can be eaten at this point but I think it is better to let the oats finish soaking on the stove for at least two to four hours. Then reheat in a double boiler, or warm in a microwave.

We usually start a pot of oats at bedtime for the next morning. See why people prefer the convenience of using rolled oats? But once you've eaten oats made right, you'll never prefer the flavor of rolled oats again. And if the human body has any natural method of assaying nutritional content, it is flavor.

Nutritionally, millet is almost the same story as oats. Millet seed is protected by a very hard hull. Cooking unhulled millet is almost impossible. After hours of boiling the small round seeds will still be hard and the hulls remain entirely indigestible. Worse, the half-round hulls (they split eventually) stick in your teeth. But prehulled millet, sitting in the sack for weeks and months, loses a lot of nutrition and tastes very second-rate compared to freshly-hulled millet. It is possible to buy unhulled millet, usually by special order from the health food distributor - if you'll take a whole sack. Millet can be hulled at home in small batches. Here's how we figured out how to do it. There probably are better ways.

Using a cheap steel-burr flour mill, set the burrs just far enough apart that the seed is ground to grits, but not flour. This pops the hulls loose. An old mill with worn-out burrs works great for this job. Then you have to get some hand seed cleaning screens just large enough to pass the grits but not pass the hulls (most of them). Window screen or other hardware cloths won't work. Seed cleaning screens come in increments of 1/128 inch; we use a 6/64' round screen. Other batches of millet might work better with a screen one step larger or smaller. It will take you a little ingenuity to find hand-held screens. They're used by seed companies and farmers to clean small batches of seed for inspection and are usually about one square foot in size with a quality wooden frame. Larger frames made of the same screening material are used in big seed cleaning machines. (The hulls could also be winnowed out by repeatedly pouring the grit/hulls mixture back and forth between two buckets in a gentle breeze.)

After you've screened out most of the hulls, the rest will rinse out, floating off as you wash the grain prior to cooking. We never hull more than enough millet for two or three meals and keep the uncooked (unwashed) millet in the freezer in an airtight jar. It is interesting how people will accept poor nutrition and its consequent sickness as the price of convenience.

If you eat much buckwheat you should also figure out how to hull (sometimes called groating) it yourself. Someone should write a thorough book on the home milling of cereals. And perhaps sell the equipment by mail. Probably would be a good little homestead business.

Something else you need to keep in mind about seed. Even though the embryo's food supply is protected by the seed coat, it still slowly deteriorates, steadily oxidizing and losing nutritional value. Eventually old seed looses the ability to sprout. The decline in germination ability matches a decline in nutritional quality. Any seed you are going to use for eating should possess the ability to sprout, strongly and rapidly. (After you've comparatively sprouted a few grain samples, you'll know what I mean by this.) Fortunately, cereal grains usually sprout well for quite a few years after harvest if they have been stored cool and dry. Eating dead or near-dead seeds will help move you closer to the same condition yourself.

Finally, one more warning about buying store bread. Salt-free bread tastes 'funny' to most people. It bakes fine, salt is not necessary to the leavening process, but no bakery could stay in business without salting their bread. The standard level of salt is two percent by weight. That is quite a lot! Two percent equals one teaspoonful per pound. I'll have more to say about the evils of salt later on.

I imagine some of my readers are feeling a little overwhelmed by all these warnings and 'bewares ofs,' and intricacies. They are used to taking no responsibility for securing their own food supply quality and have come to expect the 'system' to protect them. I believe it is not because of lack of government intervention, but because of government intervention itself, our food system is very perverse. Until our mass consciousness changes, if you wish to make yourself and your family truly healthy, you are going to have to take charge and become quite a discriminating shopper. Unconscious consumers are on a rapid road to the total unconsciousness of death.

And again, let me remind you here that this one small book cannot contain everything you should know. The bibliography at the end of should become your guide to earning your post-graduate education in nutritional health.