[Sca-cooks] Ozzies: What is freekeh and whadda ya do with it?

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

E'enin', all!

So there I am tonight, engaging in one of my favorite spectator
sports (rooting around in other people's kitchens, improvising
dinner), turning out some pretty respectable poached turbanades of
sole filled with shrimp mouse, based vaguely on an ingredient set may
family's hosts sorta kinda remembered from a meal at the Jules Verne
restaurant in the Eiffel Tower in Paris (I have weird friends).

It involved a shellfish stuffing of sorts, rolled up in filets of
sole, poached, and served on a small bed of some kind of mixed grain
pilaf, featuring wheat berries. As it happens, they had no wheat
berries around, but did have a jar of something, hand-labelled
fareekeh. It looked a little like chopped pistachios, but turned out
to be some kind of cracked green wheat.

Anyway, in short order we turned out the sole, poached in the oven in
a pan containing fish stock from the freezer -- from a batch of
gefilte fish, no less, spiked with salt, pepper, and a little
champagne vinegar, cooked a bit with the shells of the shrimp we used
to make the stuffing. The stuffing was a pretty basic mixture of
minced/hand-pureed raw shrimp, folded in with finely chopped
scallion, a tiny pinch of sugar, a tiny bit (maybe a quarter
teaspoon) of potato starch to give it a little smoothness and body,
salt and pepper. I asked my hostess if she cared about color and/or
wanted me to use white pepper, and she laughed derisively... so I
used black pepper. Then folded in an egg white beaten to soft peaks.
We put dabs of this stuff into the fish filets rolled into sort of
turban shapes (hence the name), and poached them in the
aforementioned stock/court-boullion.

In the mean time, we had prepared a sort of pilaf using this weird
green cracked-wheat product (which took quite a bit longer than
bulgur to cook) using butter, some homemade chicken stock, and a
little porcini mushroom salt (again, something I just found in the
kitchen). It was chewy, even when well-cooked, and just a bit heavy,
but I variegated the texture a bit by mixing in about a cup of cooked
rice I found in the fridge, which lightened up the flavor and texture
quite a bit.

Anyway, this was all a pretty big hit (first course). I just got in a
little while ago, and have done a web search for this green wheat
product which seems mostly to be known as freekeh, and may in fact be
a product of Australia. It seems to be used much the way bulgur is,
but this stuff seems to be either roasted or smoked, or both. I sort
of get the impression it is similar to the Latino product known as
trigo (some kind of soft green wheat, steamed and dried, commonly
used in cereal mixtures and in the blenderized batido fruit shake
beverages), except this may be a much harder wheat, maybe even durum
or something like it.

If it is an Australian thing, can anybody from down there tell me a
bit more about it?

Adamantius
--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER