Toasted Young Wheat with Milk

I'm making the bold assumption that the wheat-like plants recently planted on the new section of the Zim Smith bike path are, in fact wheat. I ate a small handful of the wheat berries the other day, and they were soft and tasty, kind of like a nut or sunflower seed. Today I returned to the area and fetched a big handful of the wheat heads. I brought them home and first manually removed the berries from the stems, then rubbed the seeds into a cutting board to try and separate the husky chaff from the edible berries. With a little work and sorting, I ended up with a small bowl of wheat berries.

I put them in a cast iron skillet and toasted them until slightly darkened and dry. They popped loudly and jumped (sometimes out of the pan) as they toasted. I continued to try to separate any remaining chaff, mostly by blowing on the pan to try to make the lighter chaff fly out of the skillet. Before long I had a small bowlful of grans to eat. The bowl was pretty good! They are very similar to steel cut oats.

It turns out that toasted young wheat has a name, Freekeh. You can find information about that here. It looks like I could have made it easier on myself by toasting the whole heads first, then rubbing them to separate the chaff from the grain.

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