Salad Smackdown: Barley Is a Winner

I love a good grain salad, so when I heard Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm waxing poetic about the quality of their barley this year, I had to get some. Of course, I'd never cooked barley before, though I'd made a killer salad with his frikeh, but I decided what the heck, my family will pretty much eat anything with enough garlic and fresh vegetables in it. To up the ante a notch, we had old friends coming over for a grilled salmon dinner, and it seemed like a grain salad with some crunchy raw vegetables would be a good match.

I wasn't wrong.

Adding water to the soaked grains.

Between the terrific salmon, which Dave grilled to perfection, and the 2009 Seufert Zenith Vineyard Pinot Noir my brother supplied to go with it, not to mention the near-perfect late Oregon summer evening and the table lit by candlelight, we all were swooning. The pop of the grain and its sweet, carrot-like flavor just made it all that much better. I don't think you could ask much more of a salad.

Barley salad

1 lb. hulless barley
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped fine
1/2 red onion, chopped fine
1 fennel bulb, chopped fine
1 c. corn kernels (or kernels sliced from 1 corn cob)
5 or 6 leaves kale, sliced into chiffonade
1/4 c. olive oil
Juice of 2 lemons
2 cloves garlic, pressed through a garlic press
2 tsp. salt, then more to taste

Put barley in large pot. Cover with cold water by 2” and soak overnight. The next day, drain and rinse the barley in a fine mesh sieve. Put in pot and cover with cold water by 1”. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 25-40 min. until done to your liking. (I like it a bit al dente, so only cooked mine 25 min.) Add more water if it gets dry.

When done, drain barley and rinse in cold water. Put in large salad bowl. Add bell pepper, onion, fennel, corn and kale and mix to combine. Add olive oil, lemon juice and salt. Mix to combine. Cover and place in refrigerator for a minimum of 30 min. before serving. Prior to serving, taste for salt and adjust as needed.

Farm Bulletin: Of Goddesses and Barley

Crops on a farm can be bountiful or spare year to year, depending on the vagaries of temperature, soil, moisture and the fluctuation of animal and bird populations that may do them harm. This year was a good year for barley, and here contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm expounds upon this grain.

Barley, Hordeum vulgare, is the small grain with the greatest diversity. There is a wide range of kernel colors, including white, tan, brown, blue, purple and black. There are varieties with two and six rows of kernels, and some indecisive sorts with four rows. There are varieties that have an indigestible hull adhered to the kernel and those that thresh free of the hull, termed naked or hulless.

Italian "Milan" barley.

The types that retain their hulls are typically used for brewing and animal feed, though they can be pearled, which removes the hull and parts of the aleurone and the germ as well. The presence of the hull reduces bloat in draft animals and is essential to the malting process where it prevents the germinating grains from overheating. The hulless trait is controlled by a single gene and means humans can eat the whole grain. The hulless varieties are more nutritious because the whole grain is edible and retained.

Ceres holds barley and poppies.

In the sometimes silly race to promote "ancient grains," barley is considered too prosaic to earn a mention. However, even 2,000 or so years ago, Pliny described it in the superlative as antiquissimum frumentum, or the oldest of the cereals. That's old, folks. And, no, we are not going to claim that any of our seeds were pulled from a tomb or old pot buried somewhere. Crop seeds are a living legacy of civilization, and are generally viable for no more than a decade at best. Barley was sometimes assigned the status as a sacred grain and it is the grain Demeter holds along with a poppy capsule in the classic renditions of the goddess.

Hulless barley.

We started working with hulless barleys over 10 years ago and have offered it off and on through the decade. There is a cluster of naked barley devotees out there, people such as Will Bonsall of Industry, Maine, and Anpetu Oihankesni of Hotchkiss, Colorado, who provided much of our collection. They have varieties from around the globe, and we combed their collections for varieties with notable flavor. Keeping all the varieties separate became too much work for a farm at our scale. So last year we took all of our varieties, mixed them up and planted them together in a single plot. A sacrilege of sorts, but otherwise hulless barley culture at Ayers Creek was doomed as an erratic and meagre offering.

This week we will bring in the mix, a classic American melting pot of barley instead of humans. You will see the blue kernels from the Arabian variety, the large brown seeds of 'Dolma' that was collected in Kinnaur, India by Oihankesni, the white kernels of two Italian varieties from Bonsall, the tiny, rice-like kernels from the Korean 'Kamet-mugi' and the Japanese 'Sangatsuga'. The black kernels are from a variety of uncertain origin called 'Jet' that we acquired from Bountiful Gardens.

We soak the barley overnight, refresh the water, bring it to a full boil and simmer it until until tender, about 40 minutes or so. Use barley as you would rice. Make pilafs, add it to soups, make grain and vegetable salads. It is flavorful, nutritious and pretty. That is the fine package that attracted us to the grain in the first place. And perhaps we can be forgiven for the sin of mixing the various types because it is an attractive collection.

Farm Bulletin: Upon the Fields of Barley

This week brings the news that Ayers Creek Farm will be expanding to include another market, this one in McMinnville. We can only assume that this is a scheme to dominate the rare organic heirloom vegetable and fruit markets, first in the city, then (bwa-ha-ha) the world. Though it may take awhile. A long while. So, for now, look for Anthony and Carol at the Hillsdale market on Sundays from 10 am till 2 pm and the McMinnville market from 1:30 pm until 6 pm on Thursdays.

Arabian Blue barley (photo, above) is an ancient six-row variety out of Saudi Arabia. It remains beautiful when cooked. The naked barleys thresh free from their hulls. For brewing and animal feed, a persistent hull is necessary as it separates the grains and keeps them from overheating during the malting process or digestion. Consequently, almost all of the barley grown in North America has a hull glued to the grain. The naked grain barleys are generally associated with cultures where brewing alcohol is forbidden. There is some breeding of the naked varieties for fattening swine, but flavor is not one of the selection criteria in those programs.

We have a few varieties of naked barley in the pipeline. Unfortunately, there is very little commercial interest in the naked varieties, so we rely on seed savers for our seed stock. There is an Arizona seed company that has some varieties, but they are proprietary and the farmer has to sign a contract that prevents them from replanting. That's no fun. It takes several years to get the first commercial crop from 200 seeds we receive from the barley enthusiasts. And yes, there are people simply dotty over naked barley walking among us unattended.

As a whole grain, barley is more nutritious and digestible than wheat. And among the grains, only corn and rice have greater diversity in kernel color, size and texture. Barley is very good for summertime vegetable and grain salads. Rinse well and soak overnight prior to cooking the grain.

[For more information on grain production than you'd ever want to know, please see Anthony's treatise on Market Farming and Grains on the blog Small Scale Grain and Pulse Production.]

Photos by Anthony Boutard.