#81 – Millet: How to Use this Sustainable, Gluten & Lectin-Free Grain

Do you cook with millet? I do and I love this ancient grain for the fact that it is super sustainable, very economical and, being gluten and lectin free, really easy to digest.

In this episode we dive in to the ancestral grain millet. We will talk about what it is, why you’d want to include it in your diet, how to cook it and I then I will go on to share in detail my seven favourite ways to use millet – we regularly consume millet all of these ways in our home.

By the end of this episode you will be armed with everything you need to know to start cooking, eating and loving this wonderful grain in your own kitchen.

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The organ supplements we use and trust – get a 5% discount (and free shipping) on grass-fed supplements, including liver capsules by visiting: https://www.oneearthhealth.com/AncestralKitchen

Resources:

Alison’s course, Boza: The Probiotic Millet Drink

Alison’s article: 7 Delicious Ways to Use Millet in Your Kitchen

Sourdough Polenta and Sourdough Polenta PDFs and videos

Sourdough Millet Crackers

Mockmill information, including links to buy that will support the podcast

 

Transcript:

Alison:
Do you cook with millet? I do, and I love this ancient grain for the fact that it is super sustainable, very economical, and being gluten and lectin-free, really easy to digest. In this episode, we dive into the ancestral grain millet. We talk about what it is, why you’d want to include it in your diet, how to cook it, and then I will go on to share in detail my seven favourite ways to use millet. We regularly consume millet all of these ways in our home. By the end of this episode you will be armed with everything you need to know to start cooking, eating and loving this wonderful grain in your own kitchen.

Music:
Music

Alison:
Welcome to the ancestral kitchen podcast with allison a european town dweller in central italy and andrea living on a newly created family farm in northwest washington state usa say. Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking and living with ancient ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.

Music:
Music

Alison:
Hello Andrea.

Andrea:
Hello Alison, how are you?

Alison:
Hello, yeah I’m good thank you. How are you today?

Andrea:
I’m good. I’m cold. It’s still cold over here.

Alison:
Oh, it’s warm here. Yeah. Because the sun’s out. When the sun comes out in Italy, everything gets warm, even if it’s like the middle of winter. So, yeah, I’m happy.

Andrea:
Well, I’m reading Enchanted April, so you’re not helping me at all.

Alison:
I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Andrea:
I already want to move to a castle.

Alison:
Have you had breakfast? Are you cold and hungry or are you cold and full?

Andrea:
So I actually do have a warm milk drink, the mushroom stuff with me now. But what I’m making when I go upstairs, same thing I had yesterday, which is a sprouted bagel toasted with a little grease drippings from a sausage patty. So making some of our homemade breakfast sausage into a patty and frying. We have this hen that flew the coop and she lays her egg in the garage every day so it’s been my breakfast egg she likes it yeah well i’m not complaining it’s not a far trip so um fry that egg put it on the toasted bagel with the sausage and um read another chapter of uh ellen montgomery’s bio which is

Alison:
Okay yeah.

Andrea:
There’s so many

Alison:
Little told me about that didn’t you i remember a few weeks yeah yeah.

Andrea:
There’s so many little things in there that i need to go and drop in the um anybody who’s listening who’s on the patreon and go in discord there’s a food and literature thread where when we run across this you know ancestral food in old books kind of stuff we have to share the phrases um and

Alison:
I love the bit that you put in there i love the bit that you put in there from mary barton about the oat clap cake i went back oh yeah and.

Andrea:
Francine’s piece about the plum pudding when she was making the plum pudding or or the christmas pudding from uh dickens yeah that was so good too

Alison:
Yeah it’s really nice to see um.

Andrea:
Yeah so that will be breakfast that will be

Alison:
Entertainment i i want to make bagels one day i want to make bagels oh yeah i’m just going to do a bagel diversion here just because they’re so interesting because you boil them you know and i will get around to doing it because i used to eat bagels a lot there’s a there used to be a stall at waterloo station in london that sold bagels and i did that you know in the old days when i used to go through london and eat things and drink things that i don’t anymore um i used to have smoked salmon and cream cheese and a coffee oh my favorite um a lox bagel i do like bagels so one day i will make them tell the listeners what your mushroom thing is because they might be going oh what was that what was that mushroom thing in the milk.

Andrea:
Oh yeah on bagels i was gonna say i feel like gabriel really like making them

Alison:
Um he would i.

Andrea:
Mean wouldn’t he not be entertained by boiling.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah. Boiling.

Andrea:
The mushroom drink is this brand called OM. And they sell various mixtures of mushrooms which you can get like ones with coffee in it or ones with cocoa in it um which is what this one is

Alison:
Or i.

Andrea:
Don’t know just different blends and we order them from azure blink in the shout outs

Alison:
And.

Andrea:
They’re really good yeah i like them get some of those adaptogens first thing in the

Alison:
Morning yeah exactly it’s a good start and then.

Andrea:
Gary drinks uh young living has a drink with fermented greens and mushrooms

Alison:
Okay and.

Andrea:
So he makes that one at night

Alison:
And so.

Andrea:
He has like his morning routine and then his night routine and they both have mushrooms in them so

Alison:
Nice lovely thank you i’m clear now on what the mushrooms were.

Andrea:
Um what are well you already ate so what did you eat

Alison:
Yeah i had a bit of a treat today i had some um wild salmon which doesn’t happen very often in this house um because i just i i love salmon i’ve always loved salmon but learning kind of about salmon i kind of try to avoid farmed salmon now um and i really don’t like buying the the wild salmon much because it comes from so far away um yeah every now and again i just give in and treat myself to some so i had the oven on anyway to make um a sorghum and millet loaf and i put um a salmon fillet in there and then i had some quinoa left over from yesterday multicolored quinoa which was in the.

Alison:
I give salad to Gabriel in his lunchbox every day. So I have a big bowl of it in the fridge usually with local lettuce and carrot. So there’s the quinoa, the lettuce and the carrot and the salmon. And then I made a kind of a dressing with smashed up avocado and local olive oil and poured that all over everything and more olive oil all over the top of everything. And I watched Rob have something completely different because there was leftover and we had some steak which we don’t have very often either at the weekend and there was a leftover kind of bone bit so Rob’s just like gnawing at the bone like some carnivore in the corner some caveman while I’m there with my delicate salmon I’m.

Andrea:
Just looking at him over your teacup like oh exactly those northerners

Alison:
Exactly so.

Andrea:
What you’re saying is you guys did surf and turf for

Alison:
Lunch yeah we did just on different places yeah yeah that’s nice yeah it was lovely yeah salmon.

Andrea:
Is uh i really love salmon but same thing as you said even here i live in salmon country

Alison:
Yeah and.

Andrea:
Yeah we’ve lost most of our salmon varieties due to contamination of our streams so

Alison:
Yeah i mean that happened in england a long time ago there was a bbc food podcast on salmon a couple of years ago and it just was so sad listening to it Yeah.

Andrea:
I did a bunch of research on our salmon runs one time, wrote like this huge paper just because it was fun to write papers. And it was kind of appalling. It was sad. It was sad reading about it. But also made me feel kind of inspired because I felt like there’s so much promise that if we stop contaminating the water, a lot of these species, or not maybe all the varieties, but they’ll start to bounce back.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
Nope.

Alison:
Okay, we have a review to read. Thank you to everyone who leaves us five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. We not only smile every time we read them, but they help other people when they’re deciding whether to give the podcast a go or not. And reaching more people is what we want to do. So do you want to read the review that we’ve got today, Andrea?

Andrea:
I do, because I know the person who loves the review. And she’s very sweet to say these things, which I did not know. So Justine C. Cook is the name, and she wrote a review that she titled Nourishment for the Soul. So I see that she should be blogging because she’s already writing very well. She said, I started following Andrea over 10 years ago. Throughout the past decade, Andrea has inspired me to make simple life-changing changes that have made an impact on me and my family. During the slow Christmas episode, Andrea used the phrase, nourish the soul. And that is what this podcast does for me. I’m able to reflect, learn from, and be inspired by Allison’s and Andrea’s living. I look forward to each and every podcast. it nourishes my soul and home wonderful well likewise my friend i am also inspired by you and yes we did meet gosh over 10 years ago that’s wild what’s about maybe almost 12 years ago because i didn’t even have jacob yet okay

Alison:
That’s the way that we we we time things that’s the way we date things when we’ve got kids isn’t it.

Andrea:
It’s so true well thank you justine very very kind yeah

Alison:
Thank Thank you, Justine. It’s really wonderful. And you know, I look forward to each and every episode too.

Andrea:
I know. And I am always learning from you and inspired by your living.

Alison:
So, yeah, vice versa.

Andrea:
Me too, Justine. Me too.

Alison:
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Andrea:
Well speaking of being inspired by you allison you have a topic that is something um i don’t know i just saw the buzz in the discord this morning but um something that i did not know much about before i met you and i’m very interested to hear you discuss it

Alison:
Yeah okay so um, A couple of weeks ago, I was just experimenting my kitchen and I thought I was using the grain millet and I thought, I use this grain a lot. I’ve used it for a lot of things. And, you know, I don’t think many people know about it. And I’ve never really talked about it much on the podcast or written about it. So I think it’s about time I should. So we are going to drive in to millet today and how to use the grain which is gluten-free and lectin-free and also really sustainable how you can use it practically it’s quite a practical episode in your kitchen I.

Andrea:
Did not know it was lectin-free until you told me that when you

Alison:
That’s actually how we started with it because when we were at the tail end of helping Gable heal from the problems he had really from birth, we didn’t know it was the tail end at that point because we were still very much in it. We decided to try a lectin-free diet and therefore we turned to grains that were lectin-free and started to use millet a lot more and it the lectin-free diet made a huge difference to gable like an absolute huge difference we were completely flabbergasted um after trying so many things we weren’t expecting it and really that was the beginning of our love affair with millet um and i’ve been using it ever since so yeah the lectin part of it lectin-free part of it is why um really i’m so kind of tied to millet now we.

Andrea:
Should probably pin the idea to do a lectin-free episode one day

Alison:
Yeah yeah that would be good i.

Andrea:
Feel like so over here in the states if you hear about millet it’s probably in a bird seed mix yeah so

Alison:
I’m very interested that’s why i think most people have heard of it over here as well Don’t birds eat that.

Andrea:
But my friends who, I have friends who live in or are from Africa and they don’t have that same association.

Alison:
Africa and Asia, like huge users of millet. And Europe used to be, Europe used to be until, you know, corn and wheat took over, really.

Andrea:
Of course.

Alison:
So perhaps that’s where I should start, actually. with kind of the history because, like you said most people associate millet with bird food but actually it’s been around and been used and consumed by humans for a very very long time it’s considered an ancient grain because it’s been used for thousands of years um and it’s been found on you know pottery shards going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years and africa and asia have used it a lot um in the past So it’s an ancient grain.

Alison:
It’s not an expensive grain. Because it’s gluten free, it’s lighter than the gluten grains. So it’s actually easy to digest. Now I feel like when I’ve eaten a minute, my stomach’s not doing as much work as it does when it eats spelt or one of the grains that have got gluten in it. So I can use it kind of in my day to help me get enough calories but not overwhelm my stomach and it’s lectin-free as we’ve just said and it’s really simple and quick to cook nutritionally it’s high in protein and of course all the essential amino acids that are part of that protein it’s got tons of b vitamins it’s higher in calcium the most grains there’s phosphorus magnesium and iron in there it’s a low gi and it contains antioxidants i did try to figure out what antioxidants but there’s just papers and papers online and i thought well let’s just say it contains antioxidants because it does that works um and the reason i i kind of sure we should have done this podcast last year because the UN the United Nations um declared last year 2023.

Alison:
The year of millets and um yeah so I thought you know oh we should do an episode on millet but we never really got around to it um because it’s a really ecological grain it’s really it’s super sustainable it requires some of the lowest amounts of water to grow any of the grains it’s tolerant to drought and heat and will grow in poor soil. So the United Nations were really trying to highlight the fact that millet is a wonderful grain and, you know, communities have used it for thousands of years and it’s really easy to grow and it’s really sustainable and we should be using more of it. People should know about it, you know. I’m excited. And I agree with them.

Andrea:
Well, the fact that it is ecological, just a lot of ancient grains are because people didn’t have irrigation drip systems and stuff like we have today so you have to remember this only stuck around if it was something people could keep growing yeah so that makes sense that millet exactly is wow and

Alison:
If you i think it’s the same in the u.s if you go into stores here most of the millet that you see on the store is yellow and really very tiny little circular Yes.

Andrea:
That’s the one I have.

Alison:
That’s what you have. Okay. So that’s called pearl millet, but it is only one of numerous types of millets. That’s why the UN declared last year the year of millets, because there’s plenty of millets. So the grain that I’m going to be talking about with my examples in this episode is pearl millet. It’s yellow and it’s had its hulls taken off. You can buy it with hulls and the hulls that I’ve seen you know I’ve bought packets of it with hulls on and in that case it’s red because the hulls are kind of a brownie red um and I have worked with it a bit with hulls but the hulls are really quite hard so hard to work with there are as I said tons of different millets um foxtail is one that’s that’s quite well known and I do know that um i noticed ellie from ellie’s every day um i think about six months ago did a recipe for sourdough that had finger millet in it which is also called ragi or ragi i don’t know how you pronounce it and wheat in it as well so that’s another type of millet that’s kind of popular in other areas.

Andrea:
I’m not surprised Ellie has that. She tries all kinds of things.

Alison:
She tries everything. Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe that one’s more popular in Oz, where she is. Oh, okay. But we will be talking about pearl millet today, which is the yellow stuff that is really common in Europe and the States. Awesome. And I’ve been using millet for a very long time in my kitchen, like over a decade. And I kind of know what its advantages and disadvantages are. And I’ve come up with some wonderful ways to eat it so I am going to run through those now if that’s okay with you okay so I’ve numbered them and number one at the top of the charts is um my family’s absolute favorite way to use millet which is boza b-o-z-a start that one coming yeah exactly and I mean you’ve probably heard us listeners talking about boza on the podcast before um it’s a ancient fermented drink which i got interested in um and decided to work out how to recreate in my kitchen so that is like up there at the top of the charts it’s my favorite now.

Andrea:
Your description of boza is uh mouthwatering you should

Alison:
Okay Shall I do that then?

Andrea:
Shall I do that? Yeah.

Alison:
Okay. So, Boza, I would say, Boza is an ancient, because it is ancient, tart, sweet, creamy and fizzy drink. Just all those flavors in one. It’s like an explosion in your mouth when you drink it. Because it’s fermented, it’s probiotic. and because it’s gluten, leptin and dairy free it’s a wonderful fermented food to make for people who can’t have those foods, So if you’ve got someone who wants a fermented drink and you want to be able to make it at home for them, but they can’t have kefir, for example, milk kefir, then you could use bosom.

Andrea:
Would you say, and I think yes, because this is kind of what you did, that coming off of gaps, this is a good grain to sort of ease into?

Alison:
Absolutely. Absolutely, because millet is gluten-free and because it’s lectin-free, you don’t have those things to kind of contest with when you’re coming off gaps. And also, if you ferment it into millet, into boza, then you’re actually having it fermented as well. So it’s been all the anti-nutrients have been taken out. It’s been pre-digested and you’re getting probiotics. It’s just absolutely wonderful.

Andrea:
Okay. I’m thinking of some specific people who are doing gaps.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
And when they come out of it and they’re kids, you know, even some things like kombucha stuff can be kind of a lot.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. It’s filling as well. That’s what’s good about it. How old is it? It’s not just a liquid. It’s really old.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Alison:
So I would say it’s an ancestral drink. They found shards of pottery in the Balkan area of Europe with fermented millet on it, which dates to the 8th century BCE. Wow. So what archaeologists and people who kind of, you know, rebuild that whole process have said is that… The people who were living there made a fermented millet drink in these kind of terracotta pots or clay pots. And then they used to bury it in the ground to keep it cool. Because, of course, as with any fermented drink, if it’s warm and you leave it out after fermentation, it’s kind of optimal. It’s going to carry on fermenting and go really sour. And so usually we put ours in the fridge, don’t we? You know, that’s what we do when we’re happy with the ferment. But these were actually buried in the ground to keep them cool. So it is very, it is very an historic drink and it’s ancestral and it’s very famous in Turkey, which is one of the areas where it comes from. And there actually is, there used to be hundreds of shops in Istanbul that sold it. There is still one that’s a kind of passed down through several you know generations of a family that still sells boza in Istanbul so you can go there and you can drink it um.

Andrea:
We need to we need to do an entire episode on this because it is something that if you’re like me Alison mentions it and then you go look at all your fermenting books and you’re like oh it’s not in any of these No,

Alison:
It actually isn’t there at all.

Andrea:
What got you started?

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
How did you find it?

Alison:
Good question. So again, it goes back to that kind of lectin thing. So it was, I think, 2019.

Alison:
And we’d just taken lectins out of Gable’s diet and seen success with that. And he wasn’t eating dairy at the time. He had problems digesting it. And I wanted to give him a probiotic that I could make for him at home. I don’t like to buy capsules when I have the option of making these drinks quite easily and cheaply at home. And so I wanted, I thought, well, there must be something that, you know, other than water kefir, that I can make him, that can give him more probiotics and will be tasty and healthy for him and fun too. You make him feel like he’s got something that’s kind of special.

Alison:
So I don’t quite know how I came across it. I think I was doing some research on fermented drinks because I’m kind of a bit obsessed with carbohydrate fermented drinks, as people may know. And I found this word boza as an example of a fermented drink. And I thought, what’s that? Then I started doing research and I found some tourist articles on it. I found a few videos on YouTube of how it was sold on the streets and until quite recently in Turkey. And then I found lots of forum conversations of people who’d tried to make it and kind of failed or what they did. And so from that, I literally just reconstructed how I thought it would be possible to make Boza based on all the kind of, you know.

Alison:
Detailed articles I’d read on it and it worked what I did worked I made a starter and then I made a drink and literally the whole household just fell in love with Bosa after that you know and and I’m making it regularly like five years later I make it every week and you know the boys come home and because they’ve traveled from from Florence on the train back home and you know especially when it’s hot they’re kind of worn out and they they want something that’s refreshing, and yet has got a few calories in it and they just they come home and they’re like can I have some bosa mom gave us a class and bosa mom Rob’s like can I have some bosa is there enough can I have some yeah and they they absolutely love it they love the flavor they love the they just love everything about it and so because of that I decided to make my video course because I thought this stuff is just gold and i’ve got to show other people that that potentially want to have fun play around learn something use millet or make a probiotic for someone who can’t have those things in their life how to do it so that’s where my bosa course came from which we’ll link to in the show notes yeah and.

Andrea:
Your courses are like like watching

Alison:
It

Andrea:
Filmed in enchanted april or something because there’s all this italian sun and

Alison:
I tried to do them when it’s sunny yeah i tried to do them when it’s sunny that was the first video course i ever did the bosa course and.

Andrea:
Really that was the first one

Alison:
I’ve gone on to do more since then as people know but it was the first one i did i look back on it now i think oh look am i young and lovely i.

Andrea:
Was on on a video call with you once when the guys came home on the train and you turn the camera on they’re sitting on the couch with their cups drinking the bowls like they literally walked in the door probably dropped their bag on the

Alison:
Floor yeah that’s what they do right away yeah so it does happen you’ve seen it happen.

Andrea:
So you just drink it like the way they were drinking it, straight out the bottle into a cup?

Alison:
Yeah. Well, it depends on how thick I make it. Sometimes you can drink it out of the glass. Sometimes you need a spoon. You can play with that. You know, sometimes you can make it more pudding-y. Usually they just drink it straight because they love it. But Gabriel also likes it in smoothies. So it’s a really good base for smoothies. It’s not dairy. So you can blend banana in it. You can put nuts in it, seeds. You could put, you know, different flavorings, coconut oil. coconut all these different things you can blend into it and it makes a really a really good smoothie also we sometimes would have it as a dessert you know particularly if I’ve made it thicker so it’s spoonable rather than drinkable um we will have it either on top of something on top of some fruit Gabor likes on top of banana or apple or berries um or we just have it as a dessert on its own frankly you can stir things into it you know if you want to put some toppings some spices on the top traditionally it’s eaten with um toasted chickpeas and cinnamon and we don’t often do the chickpea thing but we do often put you know cinnamon or some similar kind of warm spice in and stir it around and then enjoy it like that.

Andrea:
Have I overheard you saying once to Gabriel something about, do you make it into, we call them popsicles. I think you call them lollies.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. I forgot about that. Thank you for reminding me. So yeah, in the summer, we have some kind of lolly molds and we make boza and then just pile it into the lolly molds, put them in the freezer. And then so yeah, so basically every day during the summer when it’s super hot here, Gabriel was coming home from school and having a boza ice lolly, which feels so good. You know because it’s not overly sweet yeah um and i know that it well exactly what’s in it it’s just the millet and the and the starter that i fermented at home and he absolutely loves them like seriously he was like it’s like getting cold he was like can we keep on making the boza rice lollies it’s cold now going forward.

Andrea:
As his hands are shaking and his lips are blue so yeah yum

Alison:
Thank you for reminding me of that i completely forgot about that because it’s winter now i forgot about the ice lollies i.

Andrea:
Think i’d like to try dropping some of that into the ice cream churn just because i like seeing what i can churn in the ice

Alison:
See i don’t have one of those so i don’t know what happens if you do that but it would be a worthy experiment i think.

Andrea:
So i i guess bose is bose is plenty like we could end here that’s plenty to do with

Alison:
Your we got to do an episode on bose at some point yeah we need to next year i.

Andrea:
Want to hear more about the history of it

Alison:
Yeah yeah but.

Andrea:
What else do you do with millet I know you do

Alison:
More than that I do I do so let’s um let’s kind of reverse back a little bit and just talk about just simply cooking millet so millet is really simple to prepare for a grain to have for dinner or supper you just put the millet in a saucepan with water with a ratio one part millet to two parts water put the lid on it and then bring it to a boil and, and then turn it to a simmer, leave the lid on, and leave it cooking. I usually leave it for about 15 minutes, it depends how high your simmer is, you could take it up to 18 minutes. Just don’t touch it, just leave it. Then turn off the heat, but leave the lid on, and put a timer on for 10 minutes.

Alison:
Once that timer’s gone off, you’ll be able to take the lid off, and using a fork you can separate the grains and fluff them up. Just the last 10 minutes without the heat on but with things steaming gives it time for those grains to separate which produces a kind of a pilaf style millet you know the grains are separate from each other and then you can you know use that to mix things in or whatever you want to eat it you can also add more water so for example instead of putting two parts water to one part millet you can put three parts water to one part millet and cook in the same way but then you’ll have a more kind of porridgey consistency which can be really nice you know in particularly in winter if you want a warm breakfast it’s kind of you know kind of like oat porridge you want to mix things into it want to put your hands around the bowl it can be a really um comforting dish like that you know so there’s two options yeah for cooking it and very often as with all grains um i just use different something different other than water so i’ll often use bone broth or meat stock you know kind of leftover whey sometimes i’ll put in there different liquids sometimes even suins um to cook so you know it’s got flavor in.

Alison:
And of itself it’s kind of like a corny corn flavor i guess the grain it’s closest to flavor wise is corn but if you put as we know if you put broth in there when you’re cooking it’s gonna absolutely ramp up the flavor and be delicious of.

Andrea:
Course wait everybody who Everybody who’s listening has a copy of Nourishing Traditions under their arm right now, I know. So do you soak it first before you cook it or you just cook it?

Alison:
I don’t usually. No, I don’t usually. I remember I used to.

Andrea:
We’re all writing this down.

Alison:
You can. You can. You can. And it does have vitic acid in it. So if you soak it beforehand or if you make a preparation like the Bosa or the other ones I’m going to talk about a bit later on, then you will go some way to mitigating that phytic acid you know we eat it sometimes in this preparation and sometimes in bosa and sometimes in the other preparations later on which are also kind of soaked so i feel like in all the different ways that we’re cooking millet i’m doing enough to potentially mitigate phytic acid in it so you can you can soak it if you want to um if you soak it you’ve got to put less water in when you cook it because obviously the grains of soaked up water before you put them in there yeah.

Andrea:
All right i think if listeners go back to the oats episode we had a little bit more of a discussion on the phytic acid topic

Alison:
Big discussion and.

Andrea:
Sorry bite no i’m just kidding

Alison:
Um and.

Andrea:
I think there’s also a the corresponding patron private podcast episode that the ktc from around that time i think we went a little bit more in depth on that also on there but just talking about yeah that so

Alison:
Go check that out yeah too about phytic acid and cool um so.

Andrea:
Hey there, thank you for being a listener of the Ancestral Kitchen podcast. It means so much to Allison and I when you post a review on Apple or Spotify or share about the podcast in your stories or send us a message and let us know what it means to you, which is hopefully something good. You can also sponsor the podcast through our Patreon account and help Rob buy weird gadgets to edit out my coughs and microphone bumps in the background. We have a variety of different levels you can choose from and a bunch of different benefits you can enjoy, ranging from additional interviews to video content and downloadable goodies. Check it out at patreon.com slash Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. So you have cooked millet. Yeah. I know you. Half the time when you tell me your lunch, you’re like, ah, I had millet in the fridge. So you eat it as leftovers.

Alison:
Yeah, we do. And, you know, it’s… It’s interesting because they’re kind of leftovers, but they’re intentional leftovers, you know, because I’m cooking more than my family needs in one meal. And with millet, once it’s cooled down, I’ll put it into a container, put it in the fridge, and then we’ll eat it for breakfast the next day, for supper the next day. The thing about millet, though, is it doesn’t keep brilliantly. You know, some of the other grains keep better in the fridge. And I said I had quinoa for my lunch today, which was left over in the fridge. That keeps better than millet in the fridge. So you have to actually pay millet a little bit of attention when you’re eating it as leftovers. Yes.

Alison:
So really the main thing I do is I reheat it in a small saucepan and I usually put stock in it, just a little bit of stock before serving. So you could just put a tiny bit of stock in the bottom and then that’ll kind of be absorbed while you’re reheating it and the millet will be as it was before. You could put more stock in and make it more soupy. I have a recipe on my blog which I will link in the show notes which I think I titled breakfast broth bowl just to alliterate a little bit and in that I put the leftover millet in the saucepan and then I add stock and I chop onions really finely carrots really finely put those in and then heat it up and let it let those onions and carrots soften soften and then i add herbs whatever i fancy and miso and stir it in and that is absolutely delicious you know you’ve got all the depth of the flavor with the stock and the onions and the miso gives it that umami and then the millet’s giving you the carb as well but it’s a beautiful um one bowl dish and you can put whatever you want in it you know you put whatever vegetables in your fancy whatever herbs you fancy.

Alison:
Whatever you’ve got there so it does require a little bit of attention for leftovers but not much and because of that you know it’s got to be easy for it to be useful in my household really, you know for a staple and and it is easy you know I will regularly you open our fridge and you’ll see probably a container with cold cooked millet in it which is going to be heated up in some way to eat the next day.

Andrea:
I hope I do look in your fridge one day. Yeah. That would be fun. I feel like with that description that you could kind of do, because you made me think of it as rice when you said, you know, you have to be careful when you reheat it. And it made me think, You could probably make a sort of a stir fry with it?

Alison:
Yeah, yeah, that would work, I think.

Andrea:
That does sound good.

Alison:
As long as you’re heating it through, you know, with a stir fry, with all the different kind of flavors in that, and the way that it’s cooked would work really well, I think, yeah. Okay, all right. Making me want to get a wok again now.

Andrea:
So breakfast broth bowl.

Alison:
Yeah. Just a stir fry stuff.

Andrea:
Link in show notes. Yeah. What next?

Alison:
What else do you think? So we’re up to, I think we’re up to number four now. Um and number four is an example is cold millet salad and it’s an example of a dish that I very often call on when I’m going somewhere and I have to create a dish to take like for a potluck for example sometimes for Gable’s school I’ve done it um and I make a cold salad with millet, and it always seems to go down really well because it’s accessible to potentially so many of the diets that might be at an event like that so it’s gluten-free so anyone who has problems with gluten can eat it it’s lectin-free and potentially you can make it vegan so you can take it to an event and you know it’s going to be something that is is welcomed by lots of different people there so the way that I make my cold minute salad is I cook my minute as I talked about a bit earlier in the way that you can separate the grains the pilaf style way then I let it cool.

Alison:
And then I put it in a big bowl and I add in vegetables. So I like to dice carrots quite small. That kind of gives you the crunch, which goes with the soft millet. And I also like to just add frozen peas.

Alison:
That really is because it’s easy. I’m literally just chopping up a carrot and then I’m getting the bag of frozen peas out and I’m pouring frozen peas into it. I don’t even have to cook them.

Alison:
It’s going to be an hour long until I take the dish. They’ll be defrosted by then. and then I add flavourings and that’s where you know you you can do whatever you want at that point again I like to use miso and I usually make it into a paste by mixing it with a bit of water beforehand and then I’ll add stir the miso through and I’ll add some oil sometimes I’ll mostly it’s olive oil frankly in this country but in the past I’ve used walnut oil used avocado oil you can put lemon you could put lime juice in it you could put vinegar in it then you can put whatever herbs you fancy in it coriander with that miso really good but you know you could put parsley you could put whatever herbs you have some dried spices whatever you want to do to jazz it up and whatever vegetables you know you have available and then make sure it’s oily enough mix it around really well and and bingo it’s done and it’s really um it’s unusual because it’s milly you know most people aren’t used to seeing that kind of thing at an event they’ll see the pasta salads or the rice salads um um but it’s more accessible to people and it’s really quick and easy to make if you’re you know in a rush and you’ve got to make a dish so very often i’ll um i’ll make that and that that’s a kind of a staple favorite for the minute grain in our house.

Andrea:
That’s a great idea, and I feel like that is a good one. Can you – could you put that in the refrigerator and then take it out cold for lunch and eat it like that?

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah.

Andrea:
I like stuff like that for school because we usually finish school right about at lunchtime, and then if you start preparing lunch, it’s kind of too late.

Alison:
Yeah, you’re hungry. Everyone’s hungry. Yeah. Yeah, you could make it in the morning. Exactly, especially me. Or make it the night before. Make it the night before. I think it would be really nice with grated cheese. You know, I’m just thinking about that. You could like, you could chop some bacon and have that small. Oh, cube cheese would be good in that.

Andrea:
I like the texture.

Alison:
Oh, you like the texture of cube cheese. Yeah. Okay. So you could put cube cheese, bacon, and now I’m still with peas, you know, peas in there. That would be nice. It’s just a blank slate for whatever you want to add to it, really. Maybe tuna, fish. That would be nice. Lots and lots of ideas.

Andrea:
Yes it’s kind of the sky’s the limit whatever’s in your garden or whatever you butchered or whatever shredded chicken in the fridge or something that we often have that i’d throw that right in there indeed so so then sourdough you did allude to that we can soak it so yeah I’m curious to hear about sourdough millet.

Alison:
So probably, you know, one of the longest preparations that I’ve been making with millet is sourdough millet polenta. And just to talk about the word polenta for a second, that polenta these days is almost universally associated with corn. You know, when you say polenta, people think, oh, it’s a corn dish. and yeah i.

Andrea:
Did until you said exactly and i was like wait what

Alison:
Exactly um and most people know that polenta comes from northern italy but corn wasn’t actually brought to italy until the 1500s and yet before that um and even more recently in areas where where corn isn’t grown polenta was made with other grains you know it’s kind of like the pottage idea porridge pottage polenta they’re all kind of the same thing in that they’re you know a grain and water cooked together to make a kind of a.

Alison:
I can’t think of a better word than gloopy, a kind of a gloopy food stuff. And, you know, polenta, just like pottage and porridge, had been made for thousands of years, long before corn came to Italy.

Alison:
And they were made with other grains. And one of the main grains they were made with was millet.

Alison:
Polenta was made with millet because millet was really, um was grown a lot in europe before the grains that we associate with the plate these days um were brought to europe and diffused through europe um so a lot of people in in italy and other countries in europe ate millet they grew millet and they ate millet um so millet polenta isn’t an oddity if you go back you know 500 years at all before that it would have been the standard in a lot of places so you can just make polenta with millet flour but I like to ferment as you said my polenta before I cook it and so I will use some millet flour and I will soak it with a starter and then cook it up and it changes the flavor it just gives it that kind of you know sourness those of us who love fermented foods it brings that tartness to it and you can control it just like you can in other ferments you know you could just soak it for a couple of hours you can soak it overnight if you want and it it brings a whole new kind of level to polenta i think and as we alluded to earlier millet does contain antinutrients so if you process it this way it will help reduce them if you put a starter in you’ve.

Alison:
Got the acid medium and the water if you’re soaking it overnight that will help mitigate phytic acid.

Alison:
I like to eat millet polenta made this way, both sweet and savoury. I like to serve it both sweet and savoury in the house. So sometimes we would have it for breakfast and it would be sweet. So we add cream in. It’s delicious if you stir cream in. And Gabe will have it with fruit. We’ll have it with nuts. It’s really nice that way, but it’s also really nice savoury. So sometimes I’ll just have it with some miso or some herbs in it but also it’s a wonderful thing to have as a kind of a center of a of a dish for the family to literally pile it onto the, plates or one big plate in the center and then put sausage and tomato sauce with it or put a bolognese sauce with it or anything kind of that you would put together with meat that has that kind of tomato-y, meaty flavour. And you can do that, you know, by literally putting it in the middle of the table and making a big hole in it and putting the sauce in it and then everyone just digs in. Or you can serve it on individual plates like that. It’s really nice like that. Really, really nice.

Andrea:
That sounds amazing. And if you keep making me think of all these things that we did for the patrons in the past, And this is reminding me of when Beatrice did, I think it might be a very first thing in the treasure trove.

Alison:
I think it was.

Andrea:
There’s a video where she was showing us how she prepares some traditional Kenyan meal components. And I remember that something that Beryl and Agnes and they would often make was this like corn polenta sort of thing in a pan. And then they would dump it out. And then you would sort of take a piece of it and eat it with warm cooked greens or a piece of chicken or something. So I sort of see that herring working perfectly here.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
It’s just like a.

Alison:
It’s a really nice sort of different thing to have. You know, we’re used to bread and we’re used to rice and we’re used to pasta. And this is different, you know.

Andrea:
That’s what I was thinking. They kind of use the corn, I don’t know what it is, I do not remember what it’s called. My brain is not working these days, but they kind of used it as a bread.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So it would show up on your plate the same way like a piece of bread would here. But it only took a few minutes.

Alison:
We can get to that in number six. So there is a video on my website, which people can get to easily for free, which shows me making that sourdough millet polenta with millet flour. So you can see the steps involved. You can see how much water I use. And there’s also a downloadable PDF on there. So we will put a link to that in the show notes. So if you want to give it a go, then do go and have a look at that video and PDF.

Alison:
And then, yeah, the last thing that I, no, the second to last thing, I’ve got another one after this. There’s so many ways to use millet. The next thing that I’ve got is actually moving towards what you were saying, making it into a bread. So again because i love to have leftovers in the fridge and i and i intentionally make more that’s what we do um i’ll cook in batches and then eat this millet sourdough millet polenta later so what what i do in that case is i’ll make much more than i need i mean maybe like four times more than I need and then I’ll serve out what we’re going to have at that meal and then I’ll take all the leftovers and before they get cold I’ll literally pile them into a loaf a bread loaf tin and I’ll squash them down yeah you okay so.

Andrea:
You’re just talking like cooked Oh, the polenta.

Alison:
Yeah, the cooked sourdough millet polenta.

Andrea:
You make four times as much.

Alison:
I’ll make the millet polenta, as per my video, as I’ve just been talking about. But I’ll literally make a massive saucepan of it rather than just enough of what I need for that meal. And then I’ll have my loaf tin ready and I’ll pile the leftovers before they go cold because it sets, which is exactly what you were saying, you know, in the Patreon video where that corn polenta was in there. Once polenta gets cold, as long as you haven’t made it super runny, you know, you’ve got the option to do that, then it will set into something that you can pick up. So I take advantage of that by having a loaf tin there, making more than I need, putting it all in the loaf tin, squashing it down, smoothing the top over. And then I’ll just leave it on the side for a couple of hours till it goes cool, till it’s cold. And then I’ll put it in the fridge. And then a couple of hours later, I’ll get a plate, turn it upside down. I usually use a silicon loaf tin, so it comes out really easily. Turn it upside down and it looks like a loaf of bread. It’s amazing. And then I’ll just put it back in the fridge. And then…

Andrea:
What do you do with it?

Alison:
Well, then it’s in my fridge so I can slice it and then I could just eat it cold like that if I wanted to with, you know, other things, the sauces or, you know, greens. Or what I like to do is warm it up and you can do that under the grill and it works fine. I’ve done it under the grill many times, but the best way to do it is to fill your cast iron pan with lard.

Andrea:
Of course.

Alison:
Then slice it and fry it in lard. Yeah. The… Edges that the the sides of the slices go kind of crispy and you know brown with a maillard reaction and delicious the inside is warmed through thoroughly but the inside is still soft and so then you bite into it and you’ve got the crispy crunchy kind of lardy outside put some salt on it before you serve it and then you’ve got the soft warm sort of slightly tart sourdough millet in the middle so yeah that’s sourdough millet step.

Andrea:
Aside fried twinkies we’re bringing in the fried millet polenta

Alison:
It is delicious the ancestral.

Andrea:
Fair it really is so good and do you sprinkle salt on it

Alison:
Yes definitely i mean you have to you have to once you fried it in the lard you’ve got to be careful when you’re fighting and i don’t leave it for too long otherwise it’ll start sticking depending on your cast iron pan but then put it on your plate and you’ve got to put salt on it i mean seriously what.

Andrea:
About if you like finely grated some parmesan over it and put some parsley on it and that would be really nice

Alison:
Yeah you could make you could you could get some cheese and make a sandwich you could have two slices of it oh cheese in the middle put the other thing on the top and you’d have a kind of a cheesy sandwich again i go back to miso i love to spread miso on it yeah as well that’s really nice um that does sound good there is also underneath the sourdough millet polenta video on the page on my website which is linked in the show notes there is also another video of how to make that sourdough millet polenta bread just shows you how yes what consistency i make the polenta and then putting it into the um tin and i think there might even be a video of me frying it as well in there as well so the whole thing is guided yeah the whole thing is guided and it’s in the show notes so.

Andrea:
Everybody who’s still washing dishes and their stomach is growling

Alison:
Can go you.

Andrea:
Know you can go to the show

Alison:
Notes yes yeah get all those links, Do you love oats? Want to try your hand at a traditional Scottish oat fermentation? Sueann’s is just that. It was made in Scotland for centuries and will give you both a creamy, easy to digest porridge and a tangy probiotic drink. My video course, Sueann’s the Scottish Oat Ferment, over at the Fermentation School, will guide you through everything you need to know to create these two ancestral foods in your own kitchen, no matter what equipment you have. Head to ancestralkitchen.com forward slash suans, ancestralkitchen.com forward slash suans, S-O-W-A-N-S, or click the link in the show notes to get a 10% discount automatically applied. Okay, we’re nearly at the end. It’s unbelievable.

Andrea:
All right, let’s put the caps down.

Alison:
On this number seven another sourdough one so this is sourdough millet crackers and i wasn’t really sure what to call them um i i plumped for crackers mainly because if i say cakes people think i’m talking about something sweet which i’m not so um i call them sourdough millet crackers and i make these often for our supper so our meal in the evening and they are just millet.

Alison:
Water salt and a bit of sourdough starter again I use millet flour and I’ll put the sourdough starter in and the water in and leave them to ferment you could leave them a couple of hours or overnight just like the other sourdough millet options depending on your time and your palate and how fermented you want them and I found a way I’ve been making millet crackers for a while but only just recently I came up with a way to have them kind of bubbly and, by getting just the right amount of water in them to mean that when you ferment them, the batter stroke dough holds the air. And then you very carefully place them on a baking tray and those air bubbles stay. And you end up with millet crackers that instead of being kind of flat and airless, like previously I’ve made, they end up being kind of light and bubbly and really, really delicious.

Alison:
So um oh man when I when I kind of stumbled across this completely right consistency that would just capture the fermentation and that I could then transfer that very simply into the oven and have a sourdough millet cracker that was light and fluffy I thought I’ve got to write this down I’ve got to do this again make sure it works a second time and then I’ve got to write this down So we’ve eaten them probably over the last six weeks about, I don’t know, 15 times because we love them so much.

Andrea:
I mean, you’ve got to test the recipe.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
What are you supposed to do?

Alison:
But they’re simple. You just mix it up. I mix it up the night before I leave it and then half an hour before it’s time for supper. The next day, I’ll just go and get the bowl and then dollop these things onto the tray, put them in the oven for 25 minutes and then we have them warm from the oven. Put some butter on.

Andrea:
They look really, because you posted those in Discord too, so patrons did see these. And they look portable. Like, could you take them on the go?

Alison:
Yeah, they would be. Millet, as millet has its kind of little foibles, it tends to dry at the top. So the bit that’s in contact with the baking tray is more solid. The bit that’s at the top, particularly if you’re using an oven with a fan, will be drier. So it might crack a little bit, but I would certainly take them places for sure.

Andrea:
If you’re putting butter on top.

Alison:
Three or four of them in a Tupperware to take out, you know, in a container to take out.

Andrea:
I’m just picturing, you know, Rob on the train or Gary going to work. And I’m always trying to find something that Gary can take to work with him that he can eat without having to try to keep it hot.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So you only have one hot container. So.

Alison:
Yeah. He could eat these. They last about a day, I would say, after they’ve been made. They are best hot. They are best warm straight from the oven. They’re just, you know, with the butter melting on them. They’re absolutely delicious. But they do last. You can have them the next day as well.

Andrea:
Well, they’re so… Per your instructions on your website, which has really nice pictures, by the way. Thank you. So people can see the thickness of the dough and whatnot. But I could mix them up and leave it on the counter. And then in the morning when I make his breakfast, make him a couple of these and put them in a container.

Alison:
Yeah, that would work.

Andrea:
He’s good to go.

Alison:
Mm-hmm. Yum. Good to go.

Andrea:
And you said on that website or on the website, on the link for the crackers, you said you could mill your own flour or um buy it which one do you do

Alison:
I mill and i really think it makes a difference to the flavor oh for many many years listeners will know if they’ve listened to the fermenting oats episode and hopefully we’ll be doing an episode on milling a bit later in the year yes i yes indeed haven’t had a meal that that i could use to mill very very fine flour And so I’ve made all of these with millet flour from a store and with, you know, just straight millet grains. Um, then I got my mock meal, which, um, has completely transformed how we’re using grains in our house because we’re not buying any flour at all now. We’re just grinding everything. And I thought it would just, you know, I thought about the rye and I thought about the spelt, which is, you know, the breads that we make consistently. And when I imagined the mock meal, I thought, well I’d be I’d be milling my my rye my spout won’t I but I kind of forgot you know that I’m using millet and I’m using sorghum and I’m using brown rice and I’m using buckwheat and all of those now I’m buying as grains and milling so the millet that I’m using for all of these recipes I literally it’s so simple I just get my bag of millet out weigh out how much I want pass it through the mock meal it takes a couple of minutes and then i’ve got my fresh flour and i and i’ll cook with it straight away and the.

Andrea:
Weight is the weight yeah ground or

Alison:
Not exactly so it’s so simple and so easy and i think the taste the flavor is incredible compared to um having that shop-bought flour you know and the shop-bought flour did me good for well while we didn’t have the option of having a meal but since buying the meal yes it’s nicer you.

Andrea:
Can’t go back i’m so jealous of your muck mill

Alison:
We will i see how.

Andrea:
Fine the the grains are yeah or the flowers are so fine that you get from it

Alison:
They’re just beautiful they really are which not.

Andrea:
All mills do it that fine

Alison:
And it’s just so easy and and i thought you know i’ll put the muck mill away when it when we’ve got it i’ll take it out and put it away because patrons know they’ve seen a video of my kitchen it is tiny but the mock milk has stayed out on my on my counter um because i’m using it so much and because it looks really nice it’s not, It’s not something that looks all kind of like buttons and this and that. And I don’t want to have it on show. I don’t want to look at it. It looks really nice. And your grains last longer.

Andrea:
They’re cheaper when you get whole grains, not flour. There’s, as you have alluded to multiple times, there’s so many health benefits to fresh ground and actual negative effects from pre-ground.

Alison:
Indeed.

Andrea:
Lots of good reasons we’ll

Alison:
Put um a link in the show notes because if anyone is thinking of getting a mock meal then um there’s a possibility to get one and to support us as you make that purchase it won’t cost you any more at all but a little bit of your sale will come to us which helps us keep going and so if you’re thinking about it um check out the show notes because i’ll make sure that there’s a link in there to that.

Andrea:
Also i looked um just to compare prices on millet and the organic hold millet on azure so for us yeah listeners a lot of them know that um we get many of our grains that we use from azure but um their organic hold millet which is their most expensive one okay is a dollar 48 a pound if you get the smallest bag or a dollar 20 a pound if you get the biggest bag as compared to rice which is two dollars 19 a pound for the smallest and only comes down to $1.56. So even if you bought the smallest, most expensive bag of millet, it’s still cheaper than the bulk biggest price on rice. And I know some people are really trying to avoid the arsenic that comes in with rice often. Millet does not take up arsenic when it’s growing so rather than paying seven dollars a pound to try and find some super arsenic free rice from a niche somewhere I don’t even know where you’d find that um I guess millet yeah could be your new resource indeed

Alison:
That’s a really interesting fact I didn’t know about the prices in the states I mean I know how much it costs here but So that’s fascinating to.

Andrea:
See that it’s that much cheaper. Yeah, I did not know that millet was going to be cheaper. And actually, the organic millet is cheaper than the non-organic rice. And we think of rice as cheap,

Alison:
Right? Go and get some millet and make some sourdough polenta and polenta bread and boza. And yeah, be inducted into the wonderful world of millet if you aren’t already.

Andrea:
Beautiful. I love all of the ways that you use it. And I do see it. I see it turn up on your menu a lot. So I’m not surprised you have so many ideas on how to make it happen.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Anything else you want to add?

Alison:
No, I think that’s it. I think that’s it. Other than that. All right. I bet the boys are upstairs drinking Foza now. They’ve come back.

Andrea:
Yeah, they probably are. Trying to see if I can hear the straws clattering. Yeah, they probably are. Well, awesome, Alison. Okay, everything’s linked up in the show notes.

Alison:
Brilliant.

Andrea:
And everybody’s hungry now.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Time to let everyone go get to cooking, I guess.

Alison:
Yeah, go and enjoy some millet. Thank you very much, Andrea.

Andrea:
All right. Thank you, Alison.

Alison:
Bye for now.

Andrea:
Bye.

Alison:
Thank you so much for listening. We’d love to continue the conversation.

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