Brown Basmati and Amaranth grain

For people who have followed my blogging bread adventures for a while; you may remember that I  liked Amaranth flour as a substitute for sorghum and dreamed of adding brown basmati rice to my bread. A few months ago I purchased a bag of brown basmati rice and was very excited. My dreams were dashed for a while as I cooked some for dinner that night with an Indian curry which was ruined by little woody bits through the rice.

This is not a ratio representation of rice to woody bits, a 2kg (- what I cooked that night) package had about 3x that number of woody bits. The rice has now been milled, is safely in my freezer and in the next few weeks will be turned to bread. There may be different brands of brown Basmati rice available without the woody bits, I think that availability comes and goes. I would love to have had access to BB when I was living back at home for a bit… My parents being diabetic would only eat basmati, I (for health reasons) preferred whole-grains. I had looked everywhere in Rocky Health food stores and Asian store, back then I could have gotten brown Jasmine (which is not available now though how good would that have been in bread?)… I will keep up my search. 

Amaranth flour is available from local health food stores, for around $5-6/500g or the same price for 1kg of grain. I will be testing how well each machine mills the grain in the near future. For some people rice is the more affordable grain, but amaranth being an ancient grain has many health benefits that it can bring to the table.

Thanks Honey for my new ThermoScience banner that links to my Facebook page…