[Sca-cooks] barley meal

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Dec 15, 2006, at 8:30 PM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> I was going to make some Welsh barley bread for our baronial Yule
> Revel pot luck tomorrow.
>
> The recipe called for 1 1/2 pounds of barley meal. Unfortunately my
> grocery had lots of flours and meals including oats, but no barley
> meal. They did have Quaker Medium Pearled Barley and I figured I
> could grind that to a meal using my Kitchenaid food processor.
>
> However, after much grinding, spinning noises and the barley heating
> up, all I've gotten is a faction of a cup of fine barley flour and a
> cup and a half of dusty barley kernels.
>
> So what does the "Pearled" mean?

Basically, dehulled, debranned and degermed. Similar to polished  
rice. Not as nutritious but a longer shelf life.
>
> Is the food processor just the wrong machine for grinding up this
> barley? Or is there some way to do it other than simply dumping in
> the barley (I've tried both large and small batches) and turning it  
> on?

I think it's too large: the grain is just moved around instead of  
being broken up by the blades. I've ground a serviceable, if not  
quite fine enough, barley meal with an electric coffee grinder.

> I was also planning on making some baked apple cake/frittour type
> things, so for now I've abandoned the barley bread idea and I'll just
> go with them. Now to go chop up the apples "really small - almost but
> not quite as fine as grated".

Take your time, do it right. If necessary drop the apples into  
lightly acidulated water to keep them from turning brown while you  
finish the job. My experience has been that SCAdians (and, frankly,  
most people) frequently tend to do one or both of two things: the  
first is to distort the sizes of the cut pieces in their knife work,  
so what is supposed to be 1/4" dice is really 3/4" dice, and the  
second is to succumb to a fatigue factor, where the first several  
pieces are the right size, but as they go along, they slowly get larger.

Yeah, I'm a meanie...

Adamantius



"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04