GROWING GRAINS By: John Vivian

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The kernels of cereal grasses develop inside several layers of bran and husk, which nurture them as they sprout from stems or cobs. Kernels of oats and some other species are accompanied by ornamental awns (whiskers) and all manner of inedible matter that is loosely termed chaff. Kernels must be freed from this stuff in a mechanical process called threshing. Commercially today, easily dehusked grain such as wheat is threshed by being bashed with flails as it moves on a conveyor belt or inside a revolving drum. Other grains such as barley or conventional oats are so tightly held in their husk that they must be steamed or ground in a mill to be freed.

More traditional and easiest to manage on a small place is to lay the grain out and whack it with hand flails-foot long lengths of wood attached with leather thongs to a longer handle. Or else, you can hold sheaves by the ground end and bang seed heads over a "threshing horse"-a big log, for instance, or a gallon oil drum. The stalks, once kernel free (and properly termed wheat straw, oat straw or whatever) are bundled and set aside for livestock bedding or straw-tick mattresses or even for building a straw-sheaf house, while the grain is taken to be winnowed.

Winnowing

Grain is winnowed, or separated from the loose hulls or chaff, by tossing or dropping newly threshed grain in a brisk wind (or, for more control, in front of an electric fan or blower). Large (three-foot diameter) round, shallow baskets are used for threshing in many different cultures. In a maneuver that takes practice, the grain is shuffled out to the far rim of the basket and flipped up on a breezy day, then caught as it falls back. The dry matter is separated from the heavier grain kernels and carried downwind. Chaff contains nourishing bran and is commonly swept up and used as livestock feed.

Polishing

Our advice? Don't Polishing grain is a sin against nature if ever there was one. Fortunately, there is no practical way to polish grain on a small scale.

Grains exist to sprout into young plants, so they've evolved to keep a tight hold on their stores of concentrated, water soluble carbohydrates (starch) and their live plant embryos (germ), by enclosing them in tightly held protective inner husks (bran). Most of a grain's vitamins and minerals are contained in the fibrous bran and in the oils of the living germ. If freed from the protective husk, as when milled, the oils can become rancid and the starch can mold or dry out, while the bran adds a chewy roughness to the grain. For long storage of the milled product and to give a more refined appearance and texture to the cooked dish, commercial producers have long done their best to reduce grain to bleached-white, empty carbohydrates. Enrichment of polished rice and white flour was federally mandated decades ago to improve child nutrition, particularly in impoverished areas of the country such as Appalachia and the Mississippi delta. Fair enough, but didn't anyone think of leaving the original nutrients in place?

Grain Storage

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