Winnow The Wisp

Thresh, Swan, thresh!

I've never been one for catching the craze, jumping in on whatever is “trending”. I started collecting Star Wars figures a couple of years after all the other kids got bored of them, meaning I could get hundreds of the plastic figurines at bargain basement prices. Whilst my friends were starting to discover girls, I was discovering Tolkien. In more recent years, the ice bucket craze left me cold (not literally.) I've never danced Gangnam-style. And although I did sign up to Twitter before most people had heard of it, that was only because I worked in the tech communications industry and wanted to know what it was. I'm not a big tweeter.

13th June

So it comes as no surprise that although it was way back in 2013 that the UN designated it the “Year of Quinoa”, it's only now that I'm growing it. (This year is the UN's Year of Pulses, apparently, so maybe I'll go pulse-tastic in 2020.) For those of you who don't know but wish you did, quinoa is food or according to some, a superfood. It's a kind of grain they grow in South America and you can buy it for quite a lot of money from some supermarkets and health food stores. Or you can be a cheapskate and grow it yourself.

8th August

I have twelve plants that have reached about four feet tall, outside in my garden, that I started from seed. It seems quite easy to grow. Quinoa is related to fat hen, the common weed, having the same “duck's-foot” leaf shape. I had to stake them as they got taller to keep them from being blown over by strong winds. During July and August the plants started forming bushels of seed-heads, a large central one and lots of smaller secondary shoots. They began green but turned orange, and then brown. At the start of September I picked all the main heads and hung them to dry in the greenhouse.

1st September - time of the first harvest

Then last Wednesday, Anna and I found time to do the fun bit - threshing and winnowing! I think it's safe to say it's the first time I've ever threshed or winnowed anything, let alone a superfood that I had grown and was about to eat.

Threshing meant rubbing the seed heads between our hands, gloved for protection from spiky bits, over a big garden riddle (sieve). Each seed was hidden within a dried flower bract and had to be released. The larger flower bracts were caught by the riddle but a lot of the others fell through.

So we tried winnowing - tipping from one bucket into another - to let the wind catch the light chaff (useless bits of stalk) whilst letting the heavier seed fall straight down. Despite an almost complete absence of wind we had some success with this if we tipped it from quite a height. The chaff mostly fell outside the lower bucket but we still had lots of flower bracts amongst the seeds. Actually they seemed to congregate on top of the seed so we simply picked most of them off. After a fair amount of messing around like this we eventually got a collection of pure quinoa seed weighing about 100g (enough for a meal for two.)

Boiling up a sample, the first impression was that it tasted a little bitter, but we were eating it by itself which perhaps wasn't a fair test. I had heard that you are supposed to soak them for a long while first, which we hadn't done. Later on we cooked a proper meal with it and were well pleased with the results. I declare 2016 the Year of Welsh Quinoa.