Wild Rice and Barley Pudding

A variation on a Christmas classic, using some local pantry items.

I had some cooked barley in my fridge, remnants of a barley-broth.  I decided to employ the rice pudding method to save the left-overs.  (Rice Pudding Method: a lengthy secondary cooking in sugar and milk.)  The barley sucks up a lot of the milk and releases some starch into the pot.

Once a porridge has formed, cooked wild rice and dried cherries are added, and the whole lot is thickened with butter, egg yolk, and a touch of cream.

Since the wild rice and cherries are added at the end, they stay firm for textural contrast.

Wild Rice Broth: A Weird Digression

Have you ever noticed that the water you just cooked wild rice in is aromatic and flavourful and has a fantastic colour and is relatively clear?

It is.

So much so that I've started saving my wild rice broth, usually to be subtly incorporated into the same dish as the rice.  I might, for instance, reheat the rice in a bit of its own broth.

But, if you reduce the strained broth and infuse it with a bit of garlic and celery...

...I think it's good enough to be consumed as a first course.

That's weird.  I'm sorry.

Let's get back to the pudding.


Wild Rice and Barley Pudding
 

Ingredients

• 235 g cooked pearled barley
• 300 g whole milk
• 30 g dark brown sugar
• 1 pinch kosher salt
• 1/2 stick of cinnamon
• 50 g cooked wild rice
• 20 g dried sour cherries
• 30 mL brandy
• 1 egg yolk with absolutely all remnants of white removed
• 20 g butter
• 30 g heavy cream

Procedure

1. Soak the dried cherries in the brandy.
2. Put barley in a heavy-bottomed pot and cover with milk, brown sugar, and cinnamon.  Stir to combine.  Bring to the boil then simmer until most of the milk has boiled off or been absorbed, about 40 minutes.
3. Strain the cherries from the brandy.  Reserve the brandy.  Add the cherries and wild rice to the barley.  Remove the cinnamon stick.
4. Return to a simmer.
5. Remove the pot from the heat.  Stir in the butter, then the egg yolk.  Adjust the consistency of the pudding with the heavy cream.  Serve immediately, accompanied by a taste of the cherry-brandy.

Makes 3-4 servings.

Burns Supper - First Courses: Barley-Broth and Scots Rabbit

Some would think this is the inside of my compost bin, but it's actually the inside of my stockpot: roasted lamb bones and vegetables, as well as all the darkly caramelized bits scraped from the bottom of the roasting tray. These flavours formed the soul of the Burns Supper, as the resulting stock was used not only in the soup, but also in the haggis and the clapshot. They were the mellow, earthy foundation of the entire meal.

Making a pot of stock the night before a large meal has become a very fond tradition. The house fills with the aroma first of roasting bones, then of the simmering stock, while excitement for the coming meal slowly accrues.

Some specifics on the stock. First I roasted lamb bones from Four Whistle Farm. It's hard to come by good lamb femur bones, I think because of the popularity of leg roasts and shanks. A touch of tomato paste was smeared over the bones for the latter half of the roasting. Then onion, carrot, celery, and garlic were baked. The pans were deglazed with water, and bay and rosemary were added. Finally the whole lot was covered in cold water, brought to a simmer and left overnight.
 
 

Barley-Broth

Vegetable-wise the soup contained onions, kale, and carrots.

Pearled barley was cooked in a separate pot so that it wouldn't cloud the stock.

The final garnish was lamb neck. Neck is a variety-cut that sounds a lot grosser than it really is: the meat is indistinguishable from that of the shoulder. The necks were seared, braised in some of the lamb stock, cooled, shredded, and added to the soup.

Rabbit

This dish is most commonly called either "Welsh rarebit" or "Welsh rabbit." "Rabbit" is the original name, though no one knows the origin of the term. Some say it was originally derogatory, suggesting that if a Welshman went out to hunt rabbit, he would end up eating cheese for dinner.  The dish is currently experiencing a revival, and modern authors and cooks prefer to use the corruption "rarebit," as it avoids the obvious confusion with the hopping mammal.

At its heart, rabbit is hot cheese on toast. The best versions also include beer.I borrowed a technique from Fergus Henderson's book The Whole Beast. He makes a roux, then whisks his beer into it, creating what is essentially a beer velouté. The cheese is then melted into this sauce.

Besides serving Henderson's version of "Welsh" rabbit, made with Guinness and cheddar, I also developed a Scots version using Innis and Gunn and a mild gouda. If you are unfamiliar, Innis and Gunn is a Scottish beer that is aged in oak barrels, and is really one of the most remarkable beers I've ever tasted.

Scots Rabbit
Adapted from Fergus Henderson's recipe for Welsh Rarebit

• one tablespoon butter
• one tablespoon white flour
• one cup Innis and Gunn


• one pound mild Sylvan Star gouda, grated

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour, and cook until starting to colour. Whisk in the beer and bring to a simmer. Add the cheese. Stir the mixture until the cheese is thoroughly melted and a uniform sauce forms. Pour into a shallow dish and allow to set. This can be done the day before the meal.

To serve, spread onto pieces of toast and broil until the cheese browns.

The rabbit goes very well with a glass of the beer you used to prepare it. Actually it goes well with alcohol of any kind.

Wheat Pudding

I don't cook rice very often, but I used to work at a restaurant that let me take home large amounts of leftover rice, and over the years I have developed a taste for rice pudding. My favourite version is
made with a blend of brown and wild rice (which adds a satisfying chew to the dish), and dried saskatoons.

Lately I've been wondering if I could make a similar dish with a starch that is more common in my kitchen. Take that fifty pound bag of wheat berries in my closet, for instance. The one that I keep threatening to grind into flour if it doesn't make itself more useful.

I was wary of trying to adapt wheat to a rice pudding dish. When I first started cooking with wheat berries, I thought I could treat them like rice. I made some disastrous attempts at "risotto-style wheat" and "wheat pilaf." No matter how long I cooked the berries, they never seemed to burst like wild rice, or release their starch like short-grain rice, or stick to each other like pilaf. They were tasty and enjoyably chewy, with a little pop as you bit through the bran, but they just rolled around on the plate, and didn't form a cohesive starch like rice.

Lately I've been reading about the traditional Ukrainian Christmas dinner, a meal of twelve meatless courses, looking for ideas on winter meals. When reading about the main ingredients in their feast, I kept thinking, "I have that in my pantry... I canned tons of that this fall... I know where to find that...," items like dried mushrooms and fruit and sauerkraut and potatoes. It sounds like the Ukrainian landscape is very similar to ours, which makes the Ukrainian culinary repertoire a useful resource.

The first course of the dinner is usually a dish called kutia: boiled wheat berries, sweetened with honey, often flavoured with poppyseeds, served cold.

Kutia recipes gave me a method for bursting the kernels of wheat and shortening their cooking time. The key is to dry the wheat in a low oven for an hour. I'm not sure exactly why this works. Maybe drying the berries weakens the cells walls and lets the boiling water penetrate more easily. I don't know. But after drying for an hour, then soaking overnight, the berries burst after only a couple hours of boiling.

Once the cooking liquid is reduced, the dish has a great texture. I half expected the mixture to be gluey, but it's surprisingly creamy, with the exploded bran giving a good chew-factor.

At the end of cooking, I added honey, salt, dried cranberries, and a bit of butter. For a looser pudding add cream.

My only qualm is the slightly grey colour of the pudding, a flaw that I'm willing to overlook simply because it's so tasty.

Canada Goose Wild Rice

Another mind blow. Today Judy showed up with a bag of Canada Goose wild rice from Fort Assiniboine. This shocked me. Partly because it is an expensive, luxurious ingredient. Partly because as a child I was fed mostly potatoes, so rice always seemed exotic to me. (Wild "rice" is actually a misnomer: it's the seed of zizania grasses, which are not part of the rice family, though they are closely related.) Anyways, turns out it's indigenous to lakes across Canada and the northern United States.

Oats!

In the last few days I have learned a lot about oats. For example: whole oats are called groats. Not impressed? Fine. Here are the main "styles" of processed oats:

• Rolled oats: steam-rolled flat. I think the most popular style.
• Steel-cut oats: each groat is cut (by steel, I guess) into a few pieces. Sometimes called Irish oats.
  
• Quick Oats: the oats are steel cut and then steam rolled, even flatter than rolled oats, reducing cooking time (hence the name).

Why have I become a scholar of oats? This week Judy brought us a 20kg bag of rolled oats and a 20kg bag of quick oats, both from the Can-Oat mill in Manola, and each costing about $25. While Lisa and I are pushing shopping carts through organic grocery stores and reading labels to try and find local food, Judy is hitting the highway and visiting industrial milling operations and talking to farmers.

As dry goods, our oats will keep for months, as long as we store them in a cool, dry place. Regardless of how well they keep, the simple fact that there is almost a hundred pounds of oats in my house has made me anxious to start figuring out how I can use them. Hence the oat research.

The first information I came across was historical. Several sources that I consulted had a quote from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which defines oats as a grain "which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland supports the people." Apparently the common Scottish reply went something like, "That's why England produces such fine horses, and Scotland such fine men."

Eventually I found some practical information on consuming large amounts of oats. Here are the down and dirty, super-simple recipes in which I plan to eat my bounty.

Basic Granola Recipe

• 2 cups rolled oats
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/8 cup cold-pressed canola oil
• pinch of salt

Combine all the ingredients and mix with a spatula. Spread evenly on a parchment-lined tray and bake at 325F. Watch the oats around the very edges of the pan. When they are just starting to brown (about eight minutes), remove the tray from the oven. Flip and redistribute the oats as best you can, then return the tray to the oven until, once again, the oats on the perimeter start to brown (roughly another four minutes). Watch carefully: they'll burn quickly. At this point the oats will feel soft and moist, but as they cool they will become crisp. That's just the base. Add dried fruit, nuts, spices, and dairy products as you see fit. I like mine in yoghurt, with dried saskatoons.

Basic Porridge Recipe

• 1/2 cup quick oats
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 tbsp honey

Combine ingredients in bowl and cook in microwave until milk as been absorbed by oats. Stir to distribute honey. If you're feeling wild you can throw some rolled oats in for more texture.

Local Staples: Flour and Eggs

With several farmers' markets and CSA programs around the city, fresh meats and vegetables are easy to find. Other essentials, like flour, require some gum-shoeing. This week I researched where to buy some local food-staples.
Flour - Treestone Bakery has been featured in articles, like this one by Green Edmonton, and radio reports, like this one by The Dirty Hoe of CJSR, not only for the quality of its products, but for its environmental sensitivity. The daily breads at Treestone are made with whole wheat that is farmed near Leduc and milled on-site with an imported French stone. This flour is sold in one kilo bags for $2. It is a fairly coarse grind, and our preliminary batches of pasta were acceptable, but not great.

For special breads like brioche, Treestone uses white flour milled by Sunny Boy in Camrose. Thankfully you can order some of this flour. I got 5 kg of red spring wheat for $10.

Eggs - Eggs are available at the Strathcona Farmers' Market through vendors like the Holden Colony and Sunworks Farm of Armena, Alberta. They usually sell for about $4 per dozen (compared to $2.60 per dozen at a grocery store: get over it...)

If, however, you find yourself in need of eggs in the middle of the week, when your farmers' market is closed, Planet Organics carries eggs from Purnima Farms in Breton, Alberta. Large Purnima eggs command $5.67 per dozen.