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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Crock Pot thread
  • Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:40:34 EDT



> >I'm curious, why do you think they are no good? You think they've lost
> nutrition or you/your crowd don't like them? Or maybe you just mean
> the storebought ones?
>

Storebought wouldn't be germane, it's processed and stored. If someone
steamed hulled oats at home and flattened them and then ate them, they are
scarcely
different that soaked or boild. But if they are steamed and then stored a
long time, they deteriorate.

This is a factor in grain consumption, says I:

Corn, wheat, and rye are whole grains. If you plant the very kernals you
would otherwise eat, they will germinate and grow.

Rice, oats, buckwheat, and barley have a very hard seedcoat that must be
removed before they are convenient to eat (I know people who grind up
buckwheat
hull and all but it is not the norm). When these grains are sold for human
consupmtion as whole groats, they have been dehulled. For oats the most
usual way
of doing this is forcefully blowing the oats against a very hot surface that
shatters and loosens the hull.

Brown rice has been hulled as well. When rice is polished, the hull AND the
bran have been removed. Have you ever opened a bag of "organic" whole rice
and there is a faint rancid smell? It's because in the dehulling process
some
of the grain's oil is released and it rancifies.

So for oats, barley, rice, and buckwheat you are not actually buying nor
eating the actual whole grain. It has had to be processed some to make it
convenient to use.

This year we had several neat patches of volunteer oats come up from grain
left over in the horse manure we used liberally around the gardens. We
harvested a good deal of it and even had a few breaksfasts of these 'horse
manure'
oats. They were dehulled by setting the plates of the Corona mill far apart
and
running the dried kernals through that. It cracked off the hulls but left
the
groats more or less intact. The the lot was winnowed in front of a fan.

The point of all that is that the nutritional value of grains, says I, is a
matter of how little it has been processed and for how long before you eat
it.
Whole oat kernals would keep the longest and best but then you'd have to hull
them just before you use them. Once they have been hulled and exposed some
of the oils to spoilage, reducing them to steel cut oats does very little
additional damage. But steaming them and flattening them and THEN storing
them for
any length of time exposes them to quite a bit o deterioration.


James




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