If you take whole grain, with its little crystals of starch, protein and fat wrapped in a tight silica rich husk, there are a world of possible ways to put it to use. The simplest approach is to mechanically remove the hull (usually by some form of beating with a simple tool or machine). If rice grains are broken they can be boiled for a long period of time to produce a gruel called congee, often fed to the invalid. Freshly hulled brown rice has a vitality and depth of flavour that cannot be fully described to people who have only bought stale rice from the store. The whole grains can be cooked for a shorter period of time to produce brown rice (though presoaking is beneficial to reduce cooking time). The grain can be mechanically polished to remove the oil rich outer endosperm to produce white rice. When whole rice is dehulled the oils start reacting with oxygen and goes rancid, so traditionally brown rice was eaten shortly after processing. Modern commercial brown rice is slightly rancid, which might be why some people dislike it. White rice was long seen as food for the wealthy since processing took so much energy (and wealthy city dwellers could use the convenience of white rice that didn’t go off). When industrialisation reached Asia suddenly peasants could afford white rice. This led to B vitamin deficiencies in people who used to eat more nutritious brown rice, triggering deadly outbreaks of beri beri disease (a parallel to the pellagra epidemics from maize).
Rice can be further processed into flour, using yet more technology and energy. This allows the production of a wide range of new products, such as noodles, buns and rice paper for rolls. Some of these products have the advantage that they can be consumed without any utensils or bowls, making them more convenient for commerce and festivals (though the Japanese mastered rice balls and sushi for the same purpose). Noodles have the advantage of more rapid cooking than whole rice, which can make preparation more convenient. In traditional Asian culture, the dough for rice noodles was often fermented, which improves nutrition and breaks down antinutrients. Grinding the grain into flour is necessary to allow the microbes to digest the material evenly.
The principles demonstrated for rice are even truer for grains like millet, wheat, barley and rye where digestibility is lower. Hulled grains can be soaked and cooked, but the vast majority of output is milled into fine flour, though modern milling produces nutrient stripped flour with a much finer particle size, which exacerbates metabolic stress from rapid digestion. Industrial food systems have often shortened or eliminated slow fermentation steps, resulting in a final product that doesn’t deserve the same name as the preindustrial counterpart. The tight co-dependency of mechanical technology for physical processing with biological technology for fermentation was a hall mark of old-world industrial food systems. The skeletons of the very earliest grain farmers in the near east often display worn out shoulder and elbow joints, evidence of a lifetime spent grinding grain with a set of shaped rocks. As grinding technology became larger and more complex it provided an opportunity for centralisation. Grain was mostly ground on a household scale in ancient Egypt, but the first large mills that served a whole village appeared by the time of ancient Greece and became common in Roman times (often powered by livestock), increasingly powered by wind and water by Medieval times.
This steady accumulation of mechanical and technological solutions to meet basic needs gave the old world a significant technological advantage over the new world civilisations, but perhaps in the context of a wider window of history stretching long into the future this reliance on machines and metals will become a dead end. The new world civilisations in the Americas took a very different route, but parallels can be noted. The central grain crop of this region was maize, a plant which in many ways I consider to be the only truly domesticated species on the planet. The transformation from ancestral teosinte grass, with its tiny rock-hard seeds, into the extraordinary organism we find today is unparalleled in the history of domestication. The most critical difference, however, is that maize does not demand mechanical or even microbiological technology to serve as a staple crop. Maize is a rare example of a grain that relies on simple chemical tricks to become edible for humans. Boiling maize seeds in alkaline solution causes the skins to separate, a process called nixtamalisation. The alkali can come from wood ash (which adds minerals to the end product) or roasted egg or snail shells (which adds calcium). At this stage it can be added to soups called pozole. Nixtamalised grain can be ground, but since it is already soft the process can be done by hand with relatively little effort with the right equipment. If calcium was added to the resulting masa dough then it is sticky enough to be pressed flat, then cooked in energy efficient ovens to make tortillas. These have the familiar benefit of holding a complete dish of cooked meat, beans and vegetables without the need for utensils.
I’ve been thinking about all these factors as I experiment with processing the dried maize I grew last summer. I decided to make a nixtamalized batch of grain and compare it to material that was ground dry. To nixtamalize I collected ash after a mixed biomass bonfire, which was less than ideal since some material was partially burnt and a little dirty. Equal volumes of dry grain and wood ash were combined with just enough water to cover them, brought to the boil, then left to cool and soak on the stove overnight. The next day the grain was thoroughly washed, with the slimy skins from the swollen grain coming off easily. The grain was put back in the pot in plenty of clean water and boiled briefly again, then left to soak and swell. Separately I took the same volume of dry maize and ran it through my hand mill. The grains were quite large, so I loosened the stone grinding plates until the grain passed through smoothly, then ran the coarse meal through again with the plates closer together. I sieved the coarser material off the resulting meal, then added enough water to the finer flour to make a batter and left it to soak in the fridge for a few hours. Hand grinding the grain was a lot of high intensity work and used equipment to complex to build myself. By comparison using ash was basically zero technology and no labour, especially if you are already gathering fire wood for cooking.
With the nixtamalized grain I tried mashing it into a smooth meal in my large mortar and pestle, but didn’t get very far. This kind of tool is suited to making a rough mash (like mealy meal in southern Africa) but very inefficient at crushing the final lumps into a smooth paste. So I cheated and ran the mix through my blender. In South America they use a grinding stone called a metate which is more like a rolling pin in a shallow dish, which leaves lumps nowhere to hide. Now I had two batters, one from nixtamalized grain and the other from dry ground material. For each one I separated some eggs, added the yolks and some salt to the batter and beat the whites to stiff peaks. I then folded the egg whites and batter together, then cooked them in small pancakes in my cast iron pan over a medium gas flame after greasing the pan with some goat tallow. The cakes from both mixtures were fairly fragile, but I managed to turn them without breaking the cakes too often.
The taste test comparison showed the nixtamalized material had a slight smoky/tarry aftertaste which wasn’t that noticeable. Using better quality ash from a wood stove should fix this issue. The dry ground cakes had the occasional piece of coarse grit, but not enough to put me off eating them. Soaking the batter for longer might remedy this. What really stood out though was a more difficult to describe difference in flavour between the two methods. The dry ground cakes tasted flat, dead, bland. The nixtamalized cakes tasted rich and alive, almost meaty by comparison. Both batches were gobbled up, with rosella jam and a dob of (store bought) yoghurt.
All of the work grinding the grain (and cheating with the blender) to produce a batter to make the pancakes made me reflect more deeply on why I even wanted pancakes at all. They are about the only thing I eat that I can put jam on, but I don’t really see the point of making or eating jam either. Grinding grain into small particles can be useful to support fermentation, but I don’t really need or want to ferment my maize given it is already digestible after nixtamalization. The small particle size of flour also makes human digestion easier, but that can be taken too far. The more refined carbohydrates are, the faster they are digested (which stresses the whole body by causing blood glucose spikes). Tiny particles of carbohydrates are more likely to lodge in any tiny hole in the teeth, accelerating tooth decay. I suspect the same is true for small particles entering gum pockets and triggering gum disease. By contrast whole grains are gentler on the body on all levels. All that hard work and suffering to avoid washing a few soup bowls.
The end result of this experiment proved the superiority of nixtamalization for preparing dry maize. It also proved the pointlessness of grinding grain into fine particles. Instead, I will focus on securing a reliable source of quality wood ash so whole nixtamalized grains can be added to our regular soups and stews, to complement the bunya nuts, legumes and root crops which form the basis of this daily staple. I have also added them to omelettes in place of cooked rice with good results. The rich corn flavour is a big plus. I still might make the occasional batch of pancakes for special occasions, but only for social gatherings where finger food has the upper hand.
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Shane, You can dry the nixtamalized corn then grind it to make masa harina. To make masa put the fresh nixtamalized corn kernels into a blender with some water, blend into a thick soup texture then remove from blender and add some masa harina to thicken into masa consistency. Add some lard and you can make tamales.
Also it is best to keep the dry corn in a freezer to maintain that fresh corn flavor. Indian corn, or heirloom corn has a wonderful smell while it is ground but the smell and flavor decline after about three months if the corn isn’t kept in the freezer. Feed corn or ethanol corn is grown for yield but the flavor is terrible and the stuff stinks even if ground very fresh. Corn is one of the crops that really benefits from growing heirloom varieties.
Dear Shane , I made a sub stack account . Kathryn, good to see you here and I enjoy your posts on Chris’s page.
Hey Shane really enjoyed this post with the earlier musings leading into your experiment.
I agree nixtalamisation is a great technology. You may have come across examples already but nixtalamisation is not just for maize although it originated from maize cultures. It works with any grain and from what I've read yields a more digestable grain all round. Barley seems to be one that works particularly well giving it an almost bagel flavour from what I've read.
Fermentation definitely has its place but it's super handy to have another method of increasing nutrition that works whenever you're ready and doesn't require so much maintenance/makes use of a waste stream/recaptures minerals.
On the fermentation front, my interest has been in more long term/lower effort ferments like miso and doenjang. I'll find a link to a video a couple in the US made where they made a miso/umami type paste from corn and beans which supposedly turned out quite well, albeit with a Koji starter but I'm sure Koji could be grown on any starch.
Doenjang is very interesting to me as it uses the wild Aspergillus present on rice straw and wraps the soybean paste cooked with salt in it and the bricks are just left for a few years. I don't know about Aspergillus on other grasses but it could be worth it to grow some rice feral along a dam for the straw to inoculate.