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Amaranth


hathor

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That's an almond in the photo, to give you some idea of scale. It's an itsy bitsy grain/ceral.

I've popped it (thanks to Andrew Fenton's wacky suggestion!). You wind up with microscopic popcorn. It's cute, but uh, limited.

I cooked some up today, and it just doesn't do it for me. Has a kind of grassy after taste that I don't care for, and as it sits during the meal, it gets a strange crunch...like grit.

So, I'm asking: what do people do with amaranth?

Other than twist it up to take weird photos. :blink:

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Welcome to my cupboards! :laugh: I have a jar filled with the grains that I purchased nearly a year ago. Popping them is not a wacky suggestion. Common. It's supposed to cook up as a tasty alternative to rice--or quinoa. Miracle food. Lotsa protein.

Deborah Madison has a recipe for amaranth cornmeal bread (feel like baking in the weather you've been having?) And since you are in Limeless Land, I'll PM the gist of the recipe if you're interested. In brief: make a sponge w bread flour, yeast, water, a little honey and nonfat dry milk (ha!), then the dough contains whole amaranth, amaranth flour (guessing you can pulverize those beads), cornmeal, WW flour & more bread flour plus corn oil and salt.

The leaves are quite good. Here's a thread I started. Guess who is referred to in the first sentence (he's selling cardoons from your Umbrian seeds and bitching about how prickly the inferior Italian variety is!): Jamaican Spinach.

Here's a thread begun by Gifted Gourmet. (Cf. posts after and inclusive of #6 especially. It really is like baby millet, a grain I've used in baking bread but am not crazy about as a side dish.)

P.S.: Michel Richard (of Citronelle) coats popcorn w melted chocolate first and then dusts them w fine cocoa powder, treating them (and grapes) as truffles so to speak. Hmmm.... I say dump them into polenta and fry it up or feed it to the chickens.

Edited by Pontormo (log)

"Viciousness in the kitchen.

The potatoes hiss." --Sylvia Plath

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Randon thoughts:

-I think it's most often used now as part of a 7 grain breakfast cereal.

-There's a thread here, I think in the Mexico section, on allegria, a candy made with popped amaranth and held together with agave "honey". I think docsconz even got a photo of a cook popping the amaranth on a hot dry comal on his seminal thread on his Mexico culinary tour.

-I made a soufflé from The South American Table that was delicious.

-Lorna Sass' great new book has some ideas as well.

Visit beautiful Rancho Gordo!

Twitter @RanchoGordo

"How do you say 'Yum-o' in Swedish? Or is it Swiss? What do they speak in Switzerland?"- Rachel Ray

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I've never made this myself but.. Raymond Sokolov has an interesting sounding recipe in With the Grain

Cook 1 cup amaranth in 3 cups water for 25 minutes. Let cool to room temp. Mix this with 1/4 cup capers, 4 eggs and a can of anchovies (chopped). Pour in a baking dish and bake for 50 minutes at 350 F.

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Sorry, my e-mail notification is ...quirky...to say the least!

Thanks for the replies.

Maybe baking it would get rid of that grit feeling, I'm just not sure. I might find some hungry chickens.

I popped them with a little oil in the pan, and I took the lid off because, well I wanted to what was going on more than I minded making a mess. We're talking pinhead size popcorn, and the problem that I had was the high percentage of unpopped grains. OK, OK, maybe that's because I didn't keep the lid on.

RanchoGordo, I can see where it would be an interesting component, as a 7 grain something or other, and that may be it's place, a supporting role instead of a featured part.

I think one of the most important things to keep in mind, is to be sure the bag that you are storing the amaranth in doesn't have a hole in it! What a mess I made! (Almost as bad as the time I dropped a 25 pound box of malted milk balls.)

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My favorite ways to use amaranth are 1) as an addition to the filling in a stuffed vegetable (such as a stuffed pumpkin); 2) in a sweet or savory pudding (like rice pudding, only with amaranth) and 3) in a cold salad, like tabouli salad (substitute amaranth for all or part of the bulgur).

I know that it is ground up and the flour is used in a lot of breads, because it is very nutritious.

I would guess than any recipe that would work for quinoa would work for amaranth.

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I'm becoming more and more convinced that amaranth is to be combined with other ingredients.

(Beebs, everyone has something that they just don't like, and for me it's congee. All my Hong Kong friends would always tease me about it! As they slurped up their congee!)

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