Cream of Wheat vs. Millet: A Battle of Breakfast Proportions

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A steaming hot bowl of pale beige porridge was how I opted to dine on brisk mornings before middle school. A decisively large pour of maple syrup over the Cream of Wheat would get beaten into the sticky smooth concoction, transforming the beige into a muddy amber. I would eat with a small dessert spoon, savoring the gelatinous pearls of wheat and licking the sweet remains from the back of the spoon. It was the perfectly engineered texture and a consistency that rendered chewing utterly unnecessary that kept me coming back for more through those middle school years.

One day recently while I rolled my cart down the cereal aisle to restock my ever-vanishing oatmeal supply, I caught a glimpse of a bright red box out of the corner of my eye. There was the cream of wheat man smiling at me, his spoon in hand. I grabbed a box out of sheer nostalgia and tossed it in the cart. At home, as I cooked the tiny granules of wheat, they bubbled in exactly the same way they had 10 years ago. As the cream of wheat thickened, the bubbles had to force themselves through the thick, gelatinous porridge. They formed craters on the beige surface when they popped. The porridge looked just like I had remembered – like the surface of some strange planet contained in a pot. I took the cream of wheat off the heat when it was still runny, my preferred consistency, and doled out a healthy serving. I spun in some maple syrup (granted, much less than I would have as a ten year old) and tucked in.

As for taste, some childhood memories are best left to memory. The porridge, even when cooked with milk and spiked with sugar, was blandly boring. I realize now that those taste memories were largely due to the 1/4 cup of maple syrup I would use to doctor the flavor. The texture was still an exciting novelty, hovering somewhere between a liquid and a solid. This was cereal you could slurp. This was fun cereal. But textural entertainment aside, this in toto is probably not a breakfast staple anyone should work back into their diet. Like most commercial cereals and breakfast products, cream of wheat is fortified with iron, some B vitamins and calcium, but this cereal makes no attempt to bulk up on fiber. This porridge won’t keep you going for much longer than it takes to consume. A refined carb, cream of wheat is sure to cause an insulin spike that leads to a rough-morning sugar-crash later. That’s never a good way to start a paper/go to morning lecture/greet your boss/go for your morning run/(fill in your morning task).

But I do owe my love of hot breakfasts to that middle school, cream of wheat tradition, though my tastes have become a bit more discerning and my porridge choices more obscure. Of course, my go-to hot breakfast is the oatmeal I’ve talked about more than just once. It never fails to deliver and is by far one of the quickest cooking grains – it goes from dry to delicious in a mere 10 minutes. Amaranth, a more obscure option, is another favorite. The consistency of amaranth is definitely in the ball park of cream of wheat, but this is an ancient grain with the nutrition and history to support it as a healthy start to your day.

My new love is millet.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a mention of this seed in Saveur, Gourmet or Bon Appetit, and I’ve never heard a celebrity chef so much as mention it. In the states, millet is equivalent to bird seed. Period. “Not for human consumption.” But in huge stretches of Asia and Africa, millet is a staple grain, replacing rice in popularity. Historians believe that millet was actually the first grain to be grown during the Neolithic era. The Sumerians, Etruscans and Romans all ate it and wrote about it. They weren’t offering up any of this precious commodity to the birds on purpose.

Of all grains, millet is one of the more densely nutritious. A single serving has 6g of protein and 10% of the recommended daily intake of fiber. This coupling of protein and fiber means it is an excellent breakfast choice since it will help keep you feeling satisfied until lunch break. Millet also contains more essential amino acids than oats, wheat or rice. On the vitamin and mineral front, millet’s got you covered. Those tiny seeds house significant levels of thiamin, riboflavin, pyridoxine, niacin and folate (all B vitamins) and magnesium, zinc, copper and iron. The iron content in millet is only exceeded by that of amaranth and quinoa. Millet, an easily digestible food, is perfect for those with digestive diseases or simply digestive discomfort.

As with all grains and seeds, millet should be soaked overnight prior to use. Soaking grains causes the enzyme inhibitors to be released into the soaking water. Enzyme inhibitors are there to prevent seeds from sprouting too soon but coincidentally combat the very enzymes that would try to digest them. Soaking also releases the phytic acids responsible for securely storing all the vitamins and minerals. By releasing this acid, the vitamins and minerals are made more easily available for human digestion.

Most importantly, millet has flavor! There’s no way you’ll confuse cream of wheat and millet, nor would you want to. Millet is deliciously nutty (a flavor that can be even further developed by a quick dry toast in a skillet) with an almond-like sweetness. The aftertaste (not something often considered) is also delicious – a deep warm smokiness almost like husk-on, grilled sweet-corn.

Simmering this porridge with the raisins gives the porridge beautiful caramel notes, making additional sugar unnecessary. Though that’s not to say a drizzle of honey or maple syrup isn’t delicious. I love topping a hot bowl of this porridge with almond milk, chopped nuts and chia seeds, but the possible topping combinations are as unlimited as your imagination.

I’ve still got that box of cream of wheat sitting in my cabinet. But there’s a jar of millet sitting in front of it that’s already had to be refilled twice.

Millet Porridge

Ingredients

1 1/4 cup millet

2 1/2 cups water

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

scant 1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup raisins

Method 

Rinse the millet. Cover with water and let stand in a covered pot overnight. In the morning, drain and rinse the millet. Return to the pot and add 2 1/2 cups water. Add the vanilla, cinnamon, salt and raisins. Bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer. Allow to cook for about 20 minutes or until all the liquid is absorbed. Allow the porridge to rest, covered, for 10 minutes. Portion into bowls and save leftovers in the fridge for another morning.

Enjoy!

Bread Science Explained (and a delicious recipe to try)

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It was Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery who revolutionized the way many of us bake bread. He took away the seeming hours of arm-breaking kneading and replaced them with a few stirs and many hands-off hours.

Needless to say, I’m a fan, and there’s been a lot of no-knead bread baking on this blog. But even for the proficient cook, traditional bread making and baking remains something of a mystery. You mix together flours, add yeast and water, knead again and again and again, the dough rises, and rises again, you bake, and then there is beautiful, delicious bread. No-knead bread takes away the most fundamental principle of bread making, namely kneading, and leaves an even bigger question in its place.

Bread baking is perhaps one of the more interesting science experiments regularly found in the kitchen. In its simplest form, bread is nothing more than a combination of water, flour and some sort of leavening agent. Depending on the type of bread, the leavening can come from either baking powder/soda or yeast. In breads like the soda bread that I posted here, the baking soda undergoes a chemical reaction. In the case of this soda bread, the alkaline baking soda interacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce the carbon dioxide bubbles that make bread rise. This kind of bread is often denser than yeasted bread and is flavored by either sugar, salt, spices, herbs or other add-ins since it lacks the flavor depth that comes from yeast.

Yeast is not an instant chemical reaction. It is a single cell fungus. There are hundreds of strains of yeast fungus, and they live virtually everywhere and anywhere. Making your own bread yeast is as simple as combining flour and water in the proper ratio and allowing the mixture to rest on the counter for a few days – all those yeasts particular to your region will colonize in the flour, feed on the sugars and make the perfect starter for truly homemade, local bread. There is the taste of your home, in your buttered breakfast toast.

Active dry or instant yeast from a packet is certainly the more popular choice when it comes to baking. This yeast is dormant and becomes active when it is combined with warm water and a bit of sugar. The yeast feeds on this sugar, just like it feeds on the sugar from the starches in the flour. The waste product of this sugar consumption is carbon dioxide, the same end product of the chemical reactions that baking soda and powder produce. You can see the bubbles that form from this sudden carbon dioxide release on the surface of a blooming yeast culture. Just like with soda breads, it is this carbon dioxide which makes the dough rise. More carbon dioxide will create a taller, less dense loaf.

The leavening agents are critical for producing the carbon dioxide that the bread needs to rise, but there is also another key player – gluten. Wheat flours are made up of starch and protein. The starch produces the sugars that feed the yeast, and protein creates the structures within the dough that confine the carbon dioxide bubbles. The most important proteins in this part of the process are glutenin and gliadin. During the kneading process, these proteins are broken down and properly aligned to form sheets of gluten. The sheets of gluten form a sort of net, or series of coves, that the carbon dioxide is trapped in. If you’re up for a test of your physical endurance, here is a recipe for a kneaded sandwich bread.

No-knead bread utilizes a unique characteristic of flour that renders kneading unnecessary – autolysis. Flour can use specific autolytic enzymes to actually break down the long, twisted protein chains of glutenin and gliadin into much shorter chains. These shorter chains easily slide into the gluten configuration. This is why many bakers allow their dough to rest and autolyse before kneading  – this makes kneading much more effective and thereby reduces the kneading time. No-knead bread takes the principle of autolysis to its natural extreme, allowing the process to occur over a very extended period of time (18+ hours). It is actually the minuscule activity of the yeast as they feed on the starches and release carbon dioxide that causes the shorter protein chains to align into sheets of gluten. But hold off on extra salt when making no-knead bread. Salt will effectively prohibit the autolysis, and that bread will not rise.

The cooking conditions matter as much as the ingredients when it comes to producing specific types of bread. In the original Jim Lahey recipe, he cooks the bread inside a dutch oven. I’ve successfully baked this no-knead bread many times in a simple bread pan – the result is a typical sandwich bread loaf. It’s still delicious, but certainly different from the airy, artisan loaf created by the dutch oven.

How can the same recipe when cooked in only slightly different ways yield such different loaves? It’s all about size. Since the volume of the dutch oven is so much less than the volume of the whole oven, using a dutch oven increases the radiant energy baking the bread. This means that those bubbles of carbon dioxide will increase at a much faster rate. The dough will thus rise more before the yeast die and the gluten sets. Preheating the dutch oven further helps this process. In addition to making a lighter loaf, the dutch oven also creates a much more humid baking environment. The presence of this humidity works not only to heat the bread more efficiently but also to create the lovely crunchy crust of artisan breads. This crispy exterior is created as the starches on the outside layer of the bread gelatinize from the heat and humidity.

There’s all the science that goes into one, little loaf. The perfect artisan bread explained in 1000 words or less. Having a base of knowledge when it comes to baking bread can open up space for experimentation, and you can craft many different types of loaves from one recipe by keeping these principles in mind. And even if all that scientific explanation doesn’t make you rush to your kitchen, it will certainly be a reliable talking point over the bread basket on an awkward first date. If it does happen to inspire you to make a gorgeous loaf, admire the dough rising on your counter. Those little yeasts are doing all the work for you.

White Whole Wheat Artisan Bread

very slightly adapted from the NY Times

Ingredients 

3 cups white whole wheat flour

1/4 tsp dry active yeast

1 1/4 tsp salt

cornmeal for dusting

Method 

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. To 1 3/4 cups warm water, add the yeast and a bit of sugar (1 tsp, honey, maple syrup, granulated – all work well). Allow the yeast to proof (the surface of the water will be dotted with foamy bubbles and it will have a distinctive yeasty smell).

Add the water and yeast to the flour. Stir to combine – the dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap (this allows the yeast to develop in a warm and humid environment). Let the dough rest about 18 hrs at room temperature (about 70F).

When the dough is dotted with bubbles it is ready for the second rise. Lightly flour a large work surface. Fold the dough over on itself once or twice. Cover with plastic wrap and allow the dough to rest for 15 minutes.

Shape the dough into a ball. Lay a cotton towel in a bowl. dust the towel with cornmeal. Place the dough seam side down on the towel and dust the dough with a touch more cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and allow to rise for 2 more hours or until it is more than double in size and doesn’t readily spring back when poked.

Heat the oven to 450F. Put a 6-8 quart heavy covered pot in the oven to preheat. Allow it to preheat for as long as possible (30 mins+). When the dough is ready, remove the pot from the oven and flip the dough, seam side up, into the pot. Cover with the lid and return to the oven. Allow the bread to cook covered for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake for another 15-30 minutes or until the bread is nicely browned.

As always, wait to slice until the bread has cooled, as difficult as that may be.

Enjoy!