Digression for cooked whole Kernza:
Had a breakfast of Kernza perennial wheat cooked as....not quite porridge, but cooked for breakfast. It was a trial to see how it is best managed, and there was so much adjustment that my notes are no longer as precise as I'd like them to be. For example, I was planning to weigh the water used before and after cooking it with an excess of water just to keep track of how much water was absorbed, but I not only forgot to measure it at the beginning, I ate some of the grain at early on and decided it was not done enough and returned the rest to the pot to keep going. So....I can tell you what I did, but I would not follow this as guidance on porridge or pilaf prep!
But: my nose was filled with the lovely sweet fragrance, although eating it plain without even a dollop of honey, cream, or fruit meant that scent was not backed up with much sweet taste. It is nutty, fragrant, and it cooked up rather unevenly as I did this batch. I'm not sure how much of the unevenness is because it is not very genetically standardized yet, or my cooking. Still, it seems like it will be just lovely in soups and pilafs when I have figured it out better than this.
What I did:
Because I did not know how much water it might need, I did not try rice cooker or pressure cooker.
I started with 50 grams of Kernza. I heated a small saucepan, added a teaspoon of butter, let it melt, and added the Kernza. I stirred it until there was a lot of popping sound (and indeed, a few kernels flew out when they popped), and it smelled toasty.
Then I added 400-500 mL of water and brought it to a boil. I cut the heat to a gentle simmer and turned off after 5 minutes, let sit 5 minutes, and tested. The tested kernels were soft so I drained it (saved the water, fortunately), and started in but it was overall still quite chewy.
I put it back on, back to boil, to low heat, simmered 10 more minutes, and noted a lot of kernels had opened up; I let sit 5 minutes and tested again. It was quite edible but about half were still quite small/narrow and a bit too crunchy. This time, at least, I had not drained it all.
10 more minutes to simmer, and then I turned off the heat and let it sit on the stove overnight.
This morning I drained it, warmed in the microwave, and ate it. Obviously not the optimum prep, but it's a start.
I think this represented the drained after 5 minutes' simmer version:
And this was as I ate it utterly plain this morning:
