JANUARY 2019; BARLEY CONTENTS HISTORY We’ve been eating barley in our breads and porridge, HISTORY feeding it to our livestock, and fermenting it to make Timeline ................................ 02 delicious alcoholic beverages for nearly 10,000 years. FOOD WAYS Why it hasn’t been granted “ancient grain” status like Lama Losang’s Tsampa ......... 04 einkorn, emmer, and spelt we’re not sure. FROM THE FIELD Next Step Produce ................. 06 The strains of barley that we grow today are almost BOOZE identical to those early domesticated crops, but it’s been Dutch Malt Whiskey ............. 08 largely edged out of our diets by heavily subsidized TIPS & RECIPES wheat. Over the last 50 years, worldwide production of Malted Choc. Chip Cookies .. 10 wheat has quadrupled while the production of barley Toasty Naked Barley .............. 11 has only doubled. Its regal status has been usurped and Roasted Barley Tea ................ 12 we’d like to help it regain its throne. Smoked Malt Gnocchi ........... 12 Perhaps this reminder of barley’s long and colorful Barley Blinis .......................... 13 cultural history will help our case... You Wanna Pizza ‘Dis? ......... 14 HANDS ON We’re Makin’ Pizza! .............. 16 01 HISTORY HISTORY Then... In Ancient Egypt, barley and wheat were The Ancient Greeks divined through A ‘barleycorn’ is a unit of measurement During the Irish Rebellion of 1798, used as a pregnancy test. A woman would barley cuisine in a process called based on the size of a dried grain of soldiers often carried barley in their urinate on the grains - if the barley Alphitomancy. Barley was kneaded with barley measuring about 1/3 of an inch. pockets as provisions. Every spring, they sprouted, the baby would be a boy and if milk and a little salt, wrapped in a Used as early as the 10th century in say, small fields of barley sprout from the wheat sprouted, a girl. If nothing greased paper, baked directly in a fire, Britain, it was mostly done away with by unmarked mass graves of these men. The sprouted, the aspiring mother was not and rubbed with verbena leaf when the 1824 Weights and Measures Act. But poet Robert Dywer Joyce wrote a poem pregnant. Apparently this theory wasn’t finished. They believed that the guilty the barleycorn legacy remains -- it’s still memorializing the soldiers titled “The totally crazy. Testing in the 1960’s found would be unable to ingest the cake and the basis for English speaking countries’ Wind That Shakes the Barley.” that 70% of the time a pregnant woman’s become sick. Furthermore, they believed shoe sizing. urine helped to promote the growth of that cakes of barley and honey could Excerpt: these grains. keep the innocent safe. Women walking “Twas hard the woeful words to frame through haunted woods would carry To break the ties that bound us them so evil spirits would be drawn to Twas harder still to bear the shame the cakes instead of them. Of foreign chains around us And so I said, “The mountain glen I’ll seek next morning early And join the brave United Men!” While soft winds shook the barley.”“ Now... On October 17th 1814, 323,000 gallons of Orzo was a coffee substitute in Italy The modern word barn comes from the Pennsylvania grows the most barley in the beer burst out of a London brewery during WW1 and WW2 made mainly Old English word bærlic, which means “of Northeast, and, thanks to craft brewers and killing 8 people. The disaster was from finely ground roasted barley. It is barley.” All of our barns are really just distillers (and bakers!), demand for the declared an act of God, leaving no one still a popular drink today and is often barley houses. grain in our state is on the rise. responsible for what must have been a ordered as a non-caffeinated alternative seriously sticky cleanup. or for children. 03 FOOD WAYS following around the pet donkey and him at just the right height to hop onto making tsampa with his mom. his donkey), his tsampa ingredients went into a bag made from stretched yak skin. “In my home we had a huge kitchen just “I’d roll it in my palm to make the tsampa.” Lama for making tsampa. We would have many bowls of sand cooking on separate fires,” It was tsampa that his family carried he told me. “You toss the grains and it with them when they fled Tibet; tsampa cooks so easy because the sand is already that Losang ate during his years as Losang’s so hot.” His family used an ancient water personal assistant to the Dalai Lama. mill to grind the grain. Samten remem- Now he lives in a small Philadelphia bers the miller – everything except his apartment with no room for a second eyeballs coated, the room fragrant. kitchen. He buys the roasted barley flour Tsampa from Tibetans living in Queens, NY and In the mornings his mom steeped black settles for American cow butter to make Story & Illustration By Katherine Rapin tea and added a knob of rich butter made his breakfast. from the milk of the family’s dri (Tibetan for female yak). She added a splash to the bottom of a bowl, poured the roasted barley flour on top and used her fingers to mix it together. Samten was too young to mix by hand, (though not too young to find a boulder to climb that would put In my quest to track down tsampa, an ‘Tsampa’ refers to both barley that’s LAMA LOSANG SAMTEN’S TSAMPA RECIPE ancient Tibetan roasted barley flour, I been roasted - traditionally with hot sand ended up in a kitchen being fed by the - and then milled, and the dish Tibetans Steep a cup of strong black tea. Add a knob of butter if you’re in the mood and venerable Lama Losang Samten. A former traditionally prepare with it: an take a sip. Pour a few tablespoons of your tea into a wide-rim bowl. Add a Buddhist monk, Samten was sent to the uncooked dumpling that tastes of hay, heaping cup of roasted barley flour. Rotate the bowl with your left hand as you states to teach the art of sand mandalas burnt toast, and forever ago. Samten’s mix with your right, swiftly pulling the mixture up from the bottom of the bowl by the Dalai Lama himself. He also been eating it his whole life. with your fingers and pressing into your palm. When the dough barely holds played ‘Master of the Kitchen’ in the together, form bite-sized dumplings by squeezing small bits between your Martin Scorsese film, Kundun. He spent his early years on his family’s curved index finger and thumb. farm in central Tibet. They grew potatoes, He’s the real deal. And, most importantly white radish, wheat and barley and raised to me, he eats tsampa on the regular. yaks. Samten’s fondest memories involve “And then you eat! That’s it.” 05 FROM THE FIELD lifted a cloth revealing a crate of the Heinz started growing grains to harvest plumpest turmeric we’d ever seen. “I get about 10 years ago, when he realized it bored easy,” he laughed. Outside, near was a missing piece of the local food the spiky branches of a trifoliate orange resurgence. “We had been growing grain tree, we saw one of his newest experi- as cover crops already,” he said. “We had ments: Szechuan pepper saplings, which to ask, what does it take to clean it, to Next Step can grow seven meters tall. make a good final product?” Later, we toured the small orchard, The answer is partly why Heinz thinks planted within a micro-climate Heinz he’s among the few small farmers in the Produce created using a tree-line wind break. region that grow organic grain: “We There are rows of Asian persimmons, spent more than $150,000 on machinery Story & Illustration By Katherine Rapin kiwi, and carefully trellised fig trees, just to clean the grain.” You need a whole which have been giving him trouble lately. lot more land since the per-acre income is so low, and the time to learn. “The roots are hardy, they re-sprout, but then the fruit matures so late into the fall When Heinz sets out to grow a new hen we rounded the last bend of We’d heard about Next Step Produce they don’t put on any sugar,” he told us. variety of barley, he starts small. Since WNext Step Produce’s winding from the folks at Keep Well Vinegar He’s trying out the Japanese step-over the seed companies he purchases from driveway, farmer Heinz Thomet told us (Heinz grows the fruit for their Bitter method (the tree is pruned so low to the don’t always have ample stock, he plants to park anywhere. I pulled up behind a Lemon flavor) and we knew their stuff ground you can actually step over it) to just a handful of seeds, enough to cover tall golden stalk with a cascade of curling was all over the menu at Woodberry try to get an earlier crop. “You train the about a half a row. After three or four dry fronds: a banana tree, beautiful in its Kitchen in Maryland. We used naked tree along a wire horizontally,” Heinz seasons of growing and saving seed, he December decay. barley – the very barley that’s in your explained “In the fall you cut it all down has enough to plant an acre. share – as our excuse to see the farm in to one branch and throw hay over it and “My wife uses the leaves to wrap her person and meet the legend.