Читать книгу Fresh and Wild Cookbook: A Real Food Adventure - Ysanne Spevack - Страница 12

Everybody in America knows about this stuff, but it’s not often made in the UK. I don’t know why – it’s so quick and easy, perfumes your kitchen with a sweet home-baking smell, is deliriously good for you and saves a fortune on decent muesli. Before preparing the granola, make sure you have a big re-usable plastic container to store it in.

Granola can be served with any kind of milk. All organic cow’s milk is good quality milk, scientifically proven to contain at least 60 per cent more alpha-linoleic acids (which help to keep your heart healthy) than nonorganic milk. I make a point of buying Manor Farm milk. Pam and Will Best, the couple whose cows produce it, have been dedicated dairy farmers for over 35 years and their experience and care is reflected not only in the texture and creaminess of the milk but in its sweet, clean taste.

Part of the reason Manor Farm’s milk tastes so sweet is that the cows munch on clover, chicory, alfalfa and other sweet-tasting salad crops. These are planted for practical cow-welfare and soil-enriching reasons, but they also add a back note to the final pint. Or maybe their cows are just particularly content. However, the main difference between Manor Farm’s milk and almost every other organic cow’s milk is that it’s not been homogenized.

Homogenization is a mechanical process that became widespread with the demise of the milkman and the rise of the supermarket. When we were kids, we shook a recyclable glass milk bottle every morning before pouring the milk. Or, if we were feeling naughty, we’d have the top of the milk when our mums weren’t looking. When everyone started buying milk in those plastic bottle-like containers that now inhabit every fridge door, the marketing men decided that the cream floating on top of our pints was an unsightly blemish. Something had to be done, and that something was homogenization.

The milk is squeezed through a tiny tube at very high pressure, so that all the lovely cream globules break down into tiny-weeny cream globules that you don’t notice and therefore can’t enjoy. All the unsightly cream disappears and the plastic bottle-like containers look fat-free. Of course they’re not really any lower in fat, plus they take away the freedom of choice to either go for the cream or avoid it.

There are no chemicals involved with homogenization, so it’s perfectly legal for organic milk producers to do it. It just doesn’t seem like the greatest idea to me – processing purely for cosmetic reasons. And there’s some evidence building that homogenized milk is bad for your heart.

I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that non-homogenized milk tastes better, has a better texture and allows the drinker to choose top-of-the-milk or shaken-up. And it comes in a paper-based carton, as opposed to a plastic bottle that will never decompose.

But back to breakfast, a time of happy optimism. When they’re in season, you can use cobnuts instead of hazelnuts in recipes, as cobnuts are simply a local Kentish type of hazelnut. They’re officially in season from St Philbert’s day on 23rd August until Christmas Day. Cobnuts are always sold as a whole nut and generally wrapped in their individual green leafy coats. They’re long and thumbnail-shaped, succulent and delicious, with a milder flavour than the round hazelnuts you get pre-shelled in packets. Make sure you do the shelling when nobody’s about, otherwise all the nuts are guaranteed to be gobbled up before the granola hits the oven.

Popped amaranth also features in this granola mix. This tiny seed from South America is a very special grain that’s like no other.

I went on a solo journey into the Amazon some years ago and found it a very hot, scary and noisy experience, with hundreds of animals and insects making a major racket all night long with their scuttling around, buzzing and general liveliness. Anyway, the local people paint their faces with an orangey-red natural greasepaint, which looks wicked and protects their skin from the sun, as it’s a bonafide total sun block. This stuff is made out of amaranth flower heads, which are big fluffy, feathery things.

Inside the flowers are thousands of tiny amaranth seeds, about 50,000 seeds per plant. The seeds are highly nutritious, full of protein and fibre, and also rich in iron, calcium and vitamin A. In fact, they contain double the amount of calcium as cow’s milk and five times more iron than wheat. And they’re also one of the only types of seed that can be popped, just like popcorn, as opposed to the many that are actually puffed, like rice.

So why aren’t we all eating lots of lovely amaranth? It’s all down to history. The Spanish conquistadors banned amaranth from polite society after discovering the traditional Aztec ritual use of these little seeds. Aztec women made sacred little dollies out of ground amaranth seeds, honey and their own monthly blood, for ceremonial eating, emulating human sacrificial rites. Quite frankly, this didn’t go down at all well with the 16th-century Spanish colonialists, who nearly wiped out the grain from the face of the earth, such was their shock and outrage.

Luckily, a few remote communities deep in the Andes kept amaranth in existence, probably because it forms the basis of the local homebrew of Peru, a highly alcoholic and, in my experience, quite revolting beverage called chicha that seems to keep the local lads and ladettes of Lima laughing.

The Aztec dolly cakes do live on in Mexico, where they’ve evolved to become the popped amaranth and sugar cake alegria, which means ‘happiness’. A nice thought for the day.