Grains should be handled naturally and not tampered with so much as in processes like milling, par boiling, drying and re-parboiling to shorten cooking time. As it is, over-refinement of grains makes them lose much of their nutritive value.
Whole Grain Rice
You may wonder why most Asians never tire of eating the rice staple day in, day out. This is because the little grains can easily catch on to and off-set the flavors of vegetable side dishes, having little or a neutral taste of their own. Though they are very tiny, they contribute immensely to your satisfaction of what really makes a balanced meal. In other words, the teeny weeny grains will go down very well with whatever accompanying foods you choose to eat. Somehow, rice promotes healthy eating in harmony with all kinds of whole foods.
It is ideal, then, to have most common grains, which are acidic foods, paired with alkalizing foods like cruciferous vegetables or leafy greens, for a good rush of those protein worker molecules to your body. This combination helps your digestion so that you get the nutrients you need for your energy.
Bamboo Rice
Once every four years, mass flowering of the bamboo produces pendulous clusters of seeds at the tips of branches. These seeds or bamboo rice is what everybody is waiting for. The thing is, bamboo rice tastes like wheat and is more nutritious than rice with its higher content of proteins, calcium and iron. However a forest harvest of bamboo rice is hardly a common event; and more often than not, the elephants will get to it before humans.
Foxtail millet
In truth, the green foxtail grass with spiky brush-like flowers on its head, is actually the wild ancestor of foxtail millet, the second most widely-planted millet species. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the incongruity; so plants do defy Mendel’s inheritance laws after all!
And in case you have been distracted by its wild origin, it will bend over backwards to serve all your culinary needs; salads and vegetable soups welcome its inclusion, so do patties along with basil, onions and garlic, while multi-seed bread and noodles are listless without this millet flour.
This sounds like a grain for all seasons; in fact, it is proving itself more and more versatile for cooking thanks to a deluge of easy home cooked recipes. No wonder foxtail millet has achieved the staple status in India and northern China, where fermenting the grains yield vinegar and wine and sprouting the grains, vegetable. However, your thyroid might disagree in moments of excess intake
When young, the nutritious milky grains are edible raw; when older, the grains are boiled. Pairing gluten-free sorghum with corn, mushrooms and oranges will give you a complete source of protein. This is because the one essential amino acid of lysine, which is lacking in sorghum, is found in the other 3 foods.
It is simply unthinkable to go against the natural grain!