Going with the grane
Cooking with whole grains is not just some cranky, health food fad. Grains add flavour and texture, and make a dish more nutritionally balanced and easier to digest.
Barley and oats are the whole grains of Scotland. Colin Clydesdale, head chef at Glasgow restaurant Strvagin (owned by his father, Ronnie Clydesdale), makes a "risotto" of pearl barley and mushrooms. He uses a mixture of mushrooms - oyster, pied de mouton, shiitake, and button mushrooms.
He brings out the nutty flavour of the barley by frying it in butter and olive oil on a baking tray until it is a rich, golden colour. It accompanies game well, especially pigeon. The risotto can be served as an appetiser on crostini topped with a fine brunoise of peppers, capers and herbs.
Ann Nicol, head chef at Dunain Park, Inverness, serves a pilaf of barley, flavoured with turmeric and herbs, as an accompaniment. She finishes it off in timbales lined with vegetable suet and says it goes particularly well with chicken dishes.
Another Nicol technique is to roll medallions of venison in oatmeal, before cooking them lightly in butter and serving with a claret and crème de cassis sauce. She prepares an oatmeal, suet and onion stuffing for turkey, pheasant and guinea fowl. Rather than stuffing the cavity she layers it under the breast skin to keep the flesh moist.
Ferrier Richardson of Glasgow restaurant Yes makes a carrot and oatmeal gêteau by mixing puréed carrots and oatmeal sweated in butter. For shape and colour it is packed into timbales lined with strips of carrots.
Richardson also serves traditional Scottish skirlie - oatmeal cooked with bacon, garlic and thyme - as an accompaniment to several dishes.
Noel McMeel, executive chef of the Beeh Hill Country House hotel, Londonderry, reveals creative ways to use much-derided semolina. Individual olive oil and semolina cakes are flavoured with Grand Marnier or Cointreau, grated orange zest, orange juice, ground almonds, brandy and sugar syrup. They are served with a St Brendan's dairy liqueur which he cooks till it almost caramelises.
For his semolina pudding, served with a compote of berries, McMeel infuses the milk used to cook the semolina with mint. Once it is cooled, he adds freshly chopped mint before setting the mixture in individual moulds.
For texture and flavour, he adds semolina to shortbread: one cup of semolina to 1/2 cup of flour with 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup butter and one tsp ground cardamom.
David Best runs the Bushells Arms, Goosnargh, Lancashire, where ferrique, an Egyptian dish of whole wheat and chicken, has been one of the most popular dishes for more than 20 years.
After overnight soaking, the whole wheat is cooked with pieces of chicken and hard-boiled eggs, flavoured with fresh fenugreek, turmeric and garlic.
Other dishes making use of grains include: lamb shanks braised with barley which has been soaked overnight, root vegetables, garlic and herbs; and halva, a dessert with Greek origins. It is made with medium ground semolina cooked with olive oil, butter, ground almonds and sugar. For service it is dusted with ground cinnamon and served with Greek yoghurt and honey.
Another interesting pudding using semolina comes from Brian Baker, chef at the Abingdon, London. He serves a semolina mousse with a rhubarb compote. After cooking in milk - and once cooled - gelatine is added to the semolina, and egg whites folded in.
Millet is a popular grain in Indian cooking. Henry Lobo, head chef of London's Veeraswamy makes a millet dessert called tisan. Ground millet is cooked in coconut milk and water over a slow flame for half an hour. It is then sweetened with jaggery, a black palm sugar.
Naresh Matta, head chef at the London's the Red Fort, serves a millet and lamb stew, gosht sayota bajri. Millet is strained to remove any dust, hulled, and cracked in a miller. After sprinkling with water, it is left to stand, then boiled. Cubed leg of lamb and chopped onion is browned in oil with cardamom, bay leaf, cinnamon, cloves and garam masala. Yogurt is added and the stew cooked for 30 minutes. Millet is added and the stew cooked for another 15 minutes.
Hansa Davhi, chef-proprietor of Hansa's, Indian vegetarian restaurants in Bradford and Leeds, serves lapsi, bulgar wheat stir-fried in ghee. Once brown, water, sultanas, almonds, currants, spices and sugar are added.
The Arab world has mastered the use of wheat in cooking. Cookery writer Anissa Helou, the author of Lebanese Cuisine (published by Grub Street, £16.99,) says tabouleh is rarely made properly outside its country of origin. It should be a parsley salad made with fine-textured, cracked wheat.
Freekeh is a Lebanese speciality wheat which is picked green, smoked over a wood fire and then hulled. It is also the name of a wheat and chicken stew. The wheat and chicken are cooked in chicken broth, cinnamon and allspice. The stew is served with plain yoghurt.
Look to the Americas for another forgotten grain - quinoa. Bianca Jones, chef-proprietor of Peruvian restaurant Fina Estampa, London, uses quinoa regularly, and it is an integral part of her beef stew. Having simmered a mixture of beef, onions, garlic, cumin and South American red chillis, aji panca, which are nothot, for 20-30 minutes, quinoa is added 10 minutes prior to service. Quinoa is also prepared as a side dish for steaksor chicken.
Event caterer Lorna Wing reveals sweet and savoury ways of using quinoa: the former, a pudding of vanilla crème anglaise with dried cherries, blueberries or pine nuts; the latter, a salad with dried cranberries, raisins, diced red and yellow peppers and a citrus vinaigrette.
Corn meal is a staple in the West Indies. Michelle Bartlett, chef-proprietor Cottons in London serves Jamaica and Barbadian cooking. She recommends a Jamaican dish of fried shark served with sweetened corn meal cakes.
