[Sca-cooks] Playing with wheat!

[Galefridus Peregrinus]

TL;DR: I’m playing with parboiling, drying, and cracking wheat. While 
everybody talks a good game about how ancient bulgur is, recipes are 
scarce.



Anyway, here’s the latest on my wheat experiments: I’ve been parboiling 
and drying ancient wheat varieties (emmer, einkorn, and durum) in 
preparation for making bulgur. I found that as much as I would like to 
sun-dry the parboiled wheat, this summer's weather has not been the best 
for such a project. So, I've prepped one batch of wheat by parching (10 
hours in an oven at its lowest setting), and another by sun-drying for 
as long as the day's weather cooperated (7-8 hours usually), then 
parching as above for a couple more hours to get rid of any residual 
moisture. I also have no idea how the historic cooks defined “parboil.” 
One food writer says the wheat was boiled for two hours, but that’s 
cooking nearly to mush. Modern wheat berry recipes recommend cooking for 
an hour. Just to have some initial number with which to experiment, I’ve 
been cooking the wheat for 10, 20, and 30 minutes. I’ve figured out that 
there’s a fair bit of interesting food chemistry going on in this 
process, but since I’m trying to channel my inner 13th century cook, I’m 
trying not to think along those lines.



The next step has been to crack the wheat. I tried using a marble 
rolling pin and slab, but I found it was hard to control and required 
too much effort. So instead I've borrowed a friend's rotary quern (thank 
you, Magnus/Peter!), which makes the process much easier.



Some observations: Durum wheat is quite hard, but it's also as brittle 
as glass, especially after boiling and drying. As a result, it's the 
simplest to grind – the grains shatter easily. I think that emmer wheat 
might be similar, but I cannot directly compare the two based on my 
current data, since I cracked the emmer with a marble slab and used the 
hand quern for the durum; however, emmer seemed to break pretty cleanly. 
I'll know for sure when I complete the next set of coarse grinds.



At this point, I need to actually cook some of bulgur that I have 
prepared. I’m still in the process of researching basic bulgur recipes, 
and so far have found remarkably few. I find the comparative dearth of 
bulgur recipes to be surprising, given that a number of sources have 
stated that the whole parboil, dry, crack, and store for future cooking 
was very likely the earliest method of preparing wheat. The few recipes 
I have managed to find involve the inclusion of cracked wheat as a 
thickener for stews or soups, making a kind of porridge. Recipes in 
another group call for mixing the cracked wheat with yogurt or a similar 
dairy product and drying it for storage, with the intention of using it 
when needed as a thickener. One interesting thing that I have observed 
is that many (though not all) of the modern bulgur recipes recommend 
browning the cracked grain in oil, then adding hot water or broth and 
cooking until the liquid is absorbed – sort of like preparing a risotto. 
I have not yet found any indication that this method of sautéing then 
adding hot liquid was used historically. I’ll post again once I’ve had 
some experience with cooking the grains.



BTW, I invite those of you who will be at Pennsic this year to stop by 
my table at the A&S display on Sunday of War Week – I hope to have a lot 
of this stuff on display, and I’d enjoy talking to folks!