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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >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