How many of you have actually heard of millet? It is one of the grains in nine-grain cereal, but beyond that...how many of you eat it? I do try to use millet because I love mixing grains. The health benefit of grains is much greater when you compound the effects of each grain by consuming a variety of different grains. So...once again...what is millet?
Millet is a grain that looks, in my opinion, a lot like quinoa. It is a tiny grain that has very significant amounts of Manganese, Magnesium (which is good for your heart because it has been shown to lower blood pressure), Niacin (which helps increase your HDL cholesterol...a very good thing!!!), B6 (which aids in the metabolism of your food) and Folic acid (which has many functions, one of which helps to prevent birth defects).
So, how do you actually eat millet? Well, it doesn't rise well, so making a solid millet yeast bread wouldn't work. However, you can mix millet with wheat and it rises extremely well, so sneaking it in your bread is one way to eat it. However...there are lots of other ways to eat it!!! You can substitute it for rice...but it is a GREAT substitute for couscous. In fact, some couscous is made of cracked millet...most is made of semolina (a type of wheat). Millet is a great grain for flatbreads. It can also be used in porridge. So, far, I mostly use it to sneak it into breads, but I am going to attempt to make some flatbread from it soon...we'll see how that goes! Tomorrow I'll give you a recipe for bran muffins that use millet flour. I'm going to try out some other recipes that use boiled millet...we'll see how it goes!!!
I just made a tamale pie the other day and used cooked millet as the topping instead of cornbread or polenta. It worked great, it was the right texture.
ReplyDeleteOoohhh...I would LOVE that recipe!!! That sounds awesome! If you wouldn't mind...I'd love to make that and then maybe feature it someday with your name...what do you think???
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