Ingredient: Pearl barley
Category: Vegetables - Pulses
Season: All
Barley's been feeding humans for millennia, though it fell out of favour during the last one as people came to see it as low-brow peasant fare.
It's most often used in soups and stews, where it serves as both a puffy grain and a thickener, but it also makes a nice side dish or salad.
At most markets, you'll have to choose between two types of barley. Hulled barley is the most nutritious, since only the tough outer hulls are polished off.
Pearl barley is the most common form of barley, but it is not the most nutritious.
While hulled barley loses only the thick outer hull in the milling process, pearl barley is stripped of the nutritious bran layer as well, leaving just the "pearl" inside.
Despite this, it's still fairly nutritious.
It takes about an hour to cook.
Substitutes:
Hato mugi:
Pressed barley or Job's tears Look for these large, pressed barley kernels in Asian markets, slightly smaller than pearl barley.
Arborio rice:
Arborio rice is Italian medium-grain rice.
It is named after the town of Arborio in the Po Valley, where it is grown.
Cooked, the rounded grains are firm and creamy due to the high starch content of this rice variety.
It is the traditional rice in risotto .
Orzo:
Orzo (from Latin hordeum) is Italian and means "barley", but in common usage in the United States.
Orzo is understood to mean rice-shaped pasta, slightly smaller than a pine nut.
It is frequently used in soups.
Despite its rice shape, orzo is not made out of rice but of hard wheat semolina.
In Turkey, it is commonly used when making rice.
Buckwheat groats:
Buckwheat groats are commonly used in western Asia and Eastern Europe.
The porridge was common, and is often considered the distinctive peasant dish.
It is made from roasted groats that are cooked with broth to a texture similar to rice or bulgur.
The dish was brought to America by Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants who called it "kasha" and used it mixed with pasta or as a filling for knishes and blins, and hence buckwheat groats are most commonly called kasha in America.
Groats were the most widely used form of buckwheat worldwide during the 20th century, with consumption primarily in Russia, Ukraine and Poland.
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