The Backyard Homestead
Page 18
‘Robust’ is gourmet-quality, tender popcorn with golden yellow kernels.
‘Ruby Red’ has burgundy-red kernels that are as decorative as they are tasty.
‘Tom Thumb’ is a New England heirloom that matures early, has short stalks, and bears yellow kernels.
‘Top Pop’ grows in tall stalks with plentiful yellow kernels.
To harvest field corn, allow the husks to dry completely. Commercial growers try to dry to a water content of 12 to 13 percent; you’ll know when your corn is dry enough because the kernels will shell easily, and as they come off the cob, small flakes from the cob will drop into your hand. Unlike most other corns, you can harvest field corn after a few frosts. Husk the ears and bring them to a cool, dry, well-ventilated space to finish drying. Store kernels on the cob or shuck them and store in covered glass containers.
How to Dry Corn
Pick fully mature sweet corn. After husking, immerse the ears in boiling water for three minutes. Drain and plunge them into ice water for three minutes. This process sets the milk in the kernels. It also keeps the corn from fermenting or smelling as it dries.
Cut the corn from the cobs and spread it onto large flat pans or cookie sheets. Place these in an oven at the lowest setting, in a food dehydrator, or in a protected spot in the sun. Stir occasionally as the corn dries. In the oven it will be a matter of hours; in your dehydrator, follow the times given in the instructions. If you dry the corn outside, put it in a covered, well-ventilated area. Remember to bring all the trays inside every afternoon before the sun goes down so the evening dew won’t remoisten the kernels and leave them thoroughly confused about whether they’re supposed to be dry or wet. You’ll know the corn is dried when it has become very hard and has turned an orange-brown color. Be careful, if you use the oven, not to let the kernels become overly brown from heat. After the corn is dried and cool, store it in an airtight container in a cool, dry place. It will keep almost indefinitely.
The kernels of fully dry corn come off the cob easily.
Storing Corn for Grinding
Corn, like any other grain, keeps better in its whole state, so don’t grind it into meal much before you use it. The degermed cornmeal on grocery store shelves lasts almost forever because the process used in refining it takes away the germ, that portion of the grain that supports life and contains oil, flavor, and nutrients. It lasts forever, but who wants it?
Your cornmeal, ground from the whole grain, is highly perishable because the fat in the germ can go rancid. How fast that happens depends on the temperature at which you store the meal. In your freezer, cornmeal will keep for several months in an airtight package; stored in the cupboard in midsummer, it may not last for two weeks. If you have a home flour mill, the best way to get good flavor and nutrition is to grind small batches at a time, storing only a few cups in the refrigerator for quick use.
Freezing Corn
1. Husk corn and remove silk from fresh ears.
2. For whole-kernel corn, blanch for 4 minutes in boiling water. For corn on the cob, blanch small ears 7 minutes, medium ears 9 minutes, and large ears 11 minutes.
3. Cool immediately in cold water. Drain well.
4. For whole-kernel corn, cut kernels from the cob at about two-thirds their depth.
5. Pack into containers or freezer bags, leaving 1 to 2 inches of headspace. Seal, label, and freeze.
6. For corn on the cob, pack corn into freezer bags after blanching and cooling, expelling as much air as possible. Seal, label, and freeze.
Plant Your Own Wheat Field
If you’re deep into gardening and self-sufficiency, sooner or later you’ll want to try growing your own wheat, if only to get yourself away from the commercial process that grows a perfectly good grain, scrapes off the bran, peels out the germ, bleaches the flour, and then sells all those things back to you separately.
When you try, you will discover that wheat is easy to grow almost anywhere in the United States, even as a wide-row crop in your garden. One gardener in Vermont attests to having planted 30 pounds of winter wheat on 1/8 acre and harvesting 250 pounds of grain in July. On a somewhat smaller scale, even if you have a front yard that’s 20 feet by 50 feet, you could plant 6 pounds of wheat and harvest nearly 50 pounds of grain.
Before you enthusiastically plan to put in enough wheat on your first try to make all the bread you expect to need for the next year, consider a small trial area for the first year. This test run will allow you to learn how the grain behaves, what its cultivation problems are, how long it takes you to handle it, how it’s affected by varying climate conditions, and so on.
Selecting Seed
Once you’ve decided how much to plant and your ground is prepared, you’ll have to decide what type to plant. It’s easy to get confused about types of wheat. Winter wheat is planted in the fall and harvested from June in the South to late July in the North. It’s fine for bread and cookies. Spring wheat is planted in the spring, harvested in the fall. It yields less than winter wheat but has a higher gluten content, so it’s better for breads.
Commercial Classes of Wheat
Both spring and winter wheat are further divided into soft wheat (lacking a high gluten content and used primarily for pastries and crackers), hard wheat (with a high gluten content, used for breads), and durum wheat (a spring crop, used for pasta). The variety you select will depend on where you live. Check with your local Cooperative Extension agent to see which variety is best for your region.
Planting Wheat
Plant winter wheat to allow for six to eight weeks of growth before the soil freezes. This gives time for good root growth. If the wheat is planted too early, it may smother itself the following spring and could be vulnerable to some late-summer insects that would be stopped by cool weather a little later. If winter wheat is planted too late, the roots may not develop enough to stand the cold, and the wheat will not winter well. This decision may depend somewhat on the quality of your soil; some researchers believe excessively wet land that puddles and freezes chokes the plant when it freezes over, depriving it of oxygen. At least theoretically, then, dryer land would support wheat at lower temperatures.
Spring wheat should be planted as early as the ground can be worked. Do the initial plowing in the fall and then till and sow in the spring.
Spring wheat should be planted as early as the ground can be worked. Do the initial plowing in the fall and then till and sow in the spring.
To ensure a fairly evenly distributed crop, figure out the amount of seed you’ll need, divide it into two piles, and broadcast one part in one direction, such as east and west, and the remainder in another, such as north and south. A cyclone crank seeder will do an even job, but for a small plot, broadcasting by hand is fine, and for planting in rows, it is probably the best approach.
Cover the seed by rototilling or raking it in to a depth of 1 to 1½ inches for spring wheat, 2 to 2½ inches for winter wheat. Then roll it with a lawn roller, or in a small area, put down a plank and walk on it to firm the bed and increase the contact between the seed and the soil.
With a fall planting and cooperative weather, the wheat should be 5 to 6 inches tall by winter. The following spring, as early as you can get on the land without wallowing in mud, roll the wheat again. This is an old practice that increases the number of stems emerging from one crown by squashing the crown and stimulating the plant to grow more stalks. The process is called tillering. After tillering, just keep the weeds down, if you can, and enjoy watching your wheat grow until it’s time to harvest.
Pick a few grains and pop them into your mouth. If they’re soft and doughy, the grain is not yet ready. When the grains are firm and crunchy, it’s time to harvest.
As you admire your rows of wheat, you’ll notice in midsummer (later for spring wheat) a change in them. The color of the stalks turns from green to anything from yellow to brown. The heads, heavy with grain, tip toward the earth. It’s time to test the grain. Pick a head, pick out a f
ew grains, and pop them into your mouth. If they are soft and doughy, the grain is not yet ready. Keep testing daily. One day the grains will be firm and crunchy. It’s time to harvest.
Harvesting
At harvest, how should you cut the wheat? If you have a very small plot, you won’t. Instead, you’ll just pick the heads of wheat off the stems. It goes quickly if your wheat field is no larger than about 6 feet wide by 25 feet long.
Using a scythe. If you like the old-time way of doing things and are going to harvest a larger amount of grain, you might try to find a scythe and cradle. The scythe itself is not unusual. What is different is the cradle, a series of long wooden fingers mounted above the scythe blade. The scythe cuts the wheat, and then the cradle carries it to the end of each swing and deposits it in a neat pile, stacked so that all of the heads are grouped together in each pile. You can cut with the scythe alone — it’s easy to find one — but you’ll waste a lot of time picking up the cut wheat and arranging it so it can be handled easily.
Harvesting with a sickle. Another possible tool for cutting small amounts of grain is the sickle. It’s a matter of grab and cut, grab and cut. If you’re right-handed, you’ll hold a handful in your left hand and swing the sickle with the right to cut the plants at nearly ground level. It’s possible to kneel or crouch in various positions to avoid getting too tired. As you cut handfuls, lay them in small piles with all heads pointed in the same direction.
Using a scythe and cradle is an old-fashioned but efficient way to harvest wheat.
After wheat is harvested, it should be tied into sheaves, which are then piled into shocks for curing.
Binding sheaves. The next step is to bind the grain into sheaves, each about 12 to 14 inches in circumference — a bunch you can hold comfortably in your two hands. Bind the same day you cut the wheat. It’s nice to have two people taking turns cutting and sheaving. You can bind with cord or baler’s twine or even with some of the wheat stems, twisting them in a way that holds the bundle firm.
Making shocks from sheaves. From 8 to 12 sheaves are piled together to form a shock (also called a shook or a stook). To make a shock, push the bases of two sheaves firmly in the ground at about a 60-degree angle, leaning toward each other, then mesh the tops of the two sheaves for stability. Mesh two more and place them at right angles to the first pair, forming a square. Pile as many as 8 or 10 more around them. A cheesecloth “hat” on top of the shock discourages hungry birds. The shocks are left in the field for a week to 10 days, curing, even during wet spells. Rain doesn’t harm the grain.
Threshing wheat in a large, clean trash can helps keep the released grains contained.
Threshing
Then it’s time to thresh the grain, to separate the straw and chaff from it. You can go about it in any number of ways.
One method is flailing. A flail consists of one piece of wood about 3 feet long, which is the handle, attached with a leather thong to a shorter piece about 2 feet long. The shorter piece is flung at the grain repeatedly, shattering a few heads each time. When using this method, you can expect to produce about 3 pounds of wheat in 20 to 25 minutes. That’s slow work. Also, there’s a trick to learning to swing the flail without rap-ping yourself on the head.
Another way is to beat the individual sheaves inside a large, clean trash can. In two hours a thresher can produce a can full of wheat, but with a lot of chaff and even solid heads in it. This is faster than flailing but produces far more debris that has to be separated from the wheat.
Winnowing
The usual method for winnowing is pouring the grain from one container to another, letting either the wind or the breeze from an electric fan push the lighter chaff out of the grain, but it’s nearly impossible to get the grain perfectly clean with this method, and you end up picking out a lot of debris by hand.
Storing
The way you store grain depends on how much you’re dealing with. Storing it properly means protecting it from heat, light, and moisture, as well as rats, mice, and insects. You can keep a small amount of grain in plastic bags in the freezer practically forever; but it takes more effort to store larger amounts.
Winnowing can be done with an electric fan.
The general recommendation is to store hard winter or spring wheat with less than a 10 percent moisture content, a moisture level that is actually difficult to attain without additional drying. Five-gallon metal or plastic cans with paint-can friction lids are ideal for storing all grains. One hundred pounds of grain can be stored in three of these containers. Garbage cans are not good for storage because making them airtight is difficult.
While these cans will prevent new insects from getting into the grain, you must take another step to eliminate any eggs or larvae already in the grain. A simple method is to heat the grain in the oven for 30 minutes at 140°F (60°C), which also will help reduce the moisture content. If you’re not sure about the accuracy of your oven’s thermostat, check it against an oven thermometer; temperatures higher than 140°F (60°C) may damage the grain.
Grinding
Some books suggest using a blender, but that doesn’t work well. You can’t make nice fine flour, only a coarse meal with particles of uneven size. At first, buying an inexpensive, hand-cranked mill sounds right and romantic — back to nature all the way. But how much flour are you going to be grinding? You’d have to grind all afternoon to get enough flour for six loaves of bread, and that’s apt to discourage you from baking at all after the first few tries.
When grinding grain, avoid the temptation to grind large amounts for future use. Grind what you need for perhaps a week, with the unused portion to be refrigerated in an airtight container. Whole grains can be stored for months without loss of taste or nutrition. This is not true with whole-grain flour.
Selecting a Flour Mill
Will it handle in a reasonable amount of time the amount of flour you expect to grind?
Does it grind without overheating the grain?
Is it easy to clean?
Can it be adjusted to grind different grains into varying degrees of coarseness?
Is it easy to use?
Will replacement parts be available if you need them?
Is it manufactured by a reputable company that will honor the warranty?
Electric stone grinder
Electric impact mill
Stand mixer attachment
Hand-cranked burr grinder
Cooking with Grains
First, remember that whole grain, like any fresh produce from the garden, must be completely clean before you cook it. Nothing will turn off those who eat what you prepare faster than biting into a mouthful of grit or chaff or even a little stone.
The easiest way to clean any grain (rice always seems to need it most) is by putting it in a large pan and running water over it, tilting the pan to run off the dust and chaff that weren’t winnowed away, swirling your fingers through the grain to catch any bits of stone, and finally draining it in a sieve or colander.
The second thing to remember is that while whole grains take longer to cook than highly refined ones, you don’t want to cook them into goo. Most whole grains cook to perfect tenderness in 45 minutes to an hour, at most.
Salt Sparingly
A word about salt. Every time you turn around, someone is warning you not to use so much salt and saying you get all you need for a week from one dill pickle. Here’s good news. When you cook with whole grains, you can easily use much less salt than you ever have before. Recipes calling for as much as a teaspoonful of salt work perfectly well with only ¼ teaspoonful.
The problem comes when you are using the salt to make the food have any taste at all. If you think about it, you realize that white flour, polished rice, highly refined grains, and the products made from them don’t have much taste except for the seasonings added to them. When the recipe on a package of white rice calls for a teaspoon of salt to cook a single cup of rice, it’s because otherwise the rice hasn’t any flavor. Bu
t whole grains have their own flavor. You may add a bit of salt so that they taste salted, but you don’t have to add it so they’ll have taste. In fact, too much salt obscures the good flavors.
Secrets of Serving
Here’s a final suggestion on how to incorporate grains into the diets of people who still think oats grow in little Os and corn and wheat grow in squares inside red-checked boxes. Do it the same way you’d approach a big black bear — very carefully. Most of us hate to admit it, but we resist change. Probably this statement includes even you. A person accustomed to food that’s bland to the taste and effortless to chew is not going to gobble up his first slice of sprouted wheat bread shouting, “Goody, goody.” More likely, he’s going to feed it to the dog and head for the neighbor’s in search of a Twinkie. And if, after reading this chapter, you get all hopped up, run out, and buy eight different grains and serve them all for supper tonight, your neighbor is probably going to get your whole family.
The way to do it is to create as little anxiety as possible. Nobody should feel that he or she must like anything. All the familiar old favorites shouldn’t be replaced suddenly with strange casseroles and dark breads. And no one, especially children, should fear that if they don’t like the wheat soup, they’ll get no supper at all. Instead, include a whole-grain dish along with the food you usually serve, with as little fanfare as possible. If somebody doesn’t like it, refrain from commenting. And never scream, “How come nobody in this house ever wants to eat anything but hot dogs and vanilla ice cream?”
Don’t get preachy about nutrition. But don’t give up, either. Continue to include whole grains in each meal, beginning with the more familiar ones like corn and rice. Cornbread made from whole-kernel cornmeal couldn’t possibly offend anyone, and brown rice is a gentle introduction to a grain without all its nutrients refined away. Save the less familiar grains such as millet and whole cooked rye for later. When you come up with something you like especially well yourself or something that seems to appeal to others, make it again. The change won’t come quickly, but in time the people you cook for will come to enjoy and often prefer whole grains.