Sigh, I was wr….. Not exactly right….
You know how you’ve been telling people stuff for almost 30 years and no one’s ever corrected you and finally you get around to trying it and……
Grains have been quite a common food item across many cultures, high in carbohydrates and protein, easy to store for long periods and relatively easy to prepare, grains have provided breads, porridge, beer (which was used as an early method of purifying water, the alcohol content was lower than most beers today but high enough to kill off any bugs).
Mostly when we think of grains we think of grasses but for this column we’re looking at grasses and other plants whose seeds can be used in a similar manner.
Grass grains:
Not all grasses are created equally, of the 12,000 or so species of grass in the world only a dozen or so have made it into agricultural production the others being too small, too difficult to process or harvest or in some other way just not being suitable.
Of the Australian grasses most fall into the too hard category, whether from sequential ripening where the seeds ripen only a few at a time or the seeds being difficult to separate from the husks and other attachments. Despite it’s promotion in the otherwise highly readable Dark Emu, Kangaroo Grass fits into the difficult to harvest and clean category so wouldn’t be one of the ones I’d be looking for for grain.
Native Millets/Panics Panicum decompositum P. effusum, despite the small seeds of about 0.5mm diameter the Millets easily make up for it being easy to harvest and process, when the seeds are ripe the heads break off and are blown away landing against trees, fences, and other structures and while they can be a fire hazard are easy to rake up. A few good hits will release the seeds and a little winnowing will clear away the husks. A friend is helping out on the research into this and tells me the resultant flour is a yellowish colour and tastes alright cooked up.
Though small, Panicum seeds are easily harvested and cleaned (photo Hunter LLS, hand model, Me)
Love Grasses Eragrostis Sp (also known as Woolybutt in Central Australia), in the same genus as Tef, smaller seeds than the panics but similarly easy to collect and process.
Eragrostis sororia Woodland Lovegrass (photo from Queensland Native Seeds)
Other Grains and seeds (some mythbusting)
Spiny Matt Rush/Lomandra (Lomandra longifolia), in their classic bush food book “Wild Food in Australia” (1987) Alan and Joan Cribb list Lomandra as reportedly being ground, baked into cakes and eaten.
Lomandra longifolia
The Cribbs managed to do little more than annoy their food processor and leave the Lomandra seeds more or less untouched, I figured I’d put a little more effort into it, a few minutes with the mortar and pestle and…..
Nothing, barely a scratch to the seed, but as they say if at first you don’t succeed get a bigger hammer, and as I have a nice selection of hammers I thought I’d try. Wrap the seeds in some kitchen paper, a few hits and,
Not very successful, so kept wrapping and hitting till getting something resembling a flour.
The true test of a flour is wetting it to form a dough or at least stick together when wet, so wetting, grinding, drying out and wetting again even after all that it shows no dough like properties at all.
Neither Tim Low (“Bush Tucker”. 1992) nor Jennifer Isaacs (“Bush Food”. 1994) list Lomandra being used as flour so in absence of anyone pointing out a technique for doing it I’m going to call it as unlikely.
Sword Grass Gahnia spp Okay, another failure, this column isn’t exactly turning out as I’d hoped but here at “The Scoop” we can say we’re at the cutting (or grinding and hammering) edge of research and will admit our mistakes. Cribb and Cribb also listed Gahnia aspera as a source of flour but were unable to crack the coats, I upgraded from the mortar and pestle to hammer and anvil. It seemed to have more promise than the Lomandra but was equally as disappointing.
I suppose this is one of the things when you’re relying on 150 year old or more source material when studying bushfoods or other aspects of Australian history, biases, mistakes, misidentifications and mistranslations all come into play, as well as this there may have been techniques used in preparation which haven’t been recorded and have been lost in the intervening years. If anyone has it figured out and can share the process I’d love to hear from you.
Footnote, the exercise wasn’t a complete loss I ground up Illawarra Flame Tree seed, which did result in a “flour”, sieving out the seed coats and adding a little water did result in a “dough” probably unlikely to hold together by itself but could be good added to cakes and breads.
Success finally, tasted ok too.