Dehydrating Cooked Whole Grains

Whole Wheat Berries 

Many of you have food mills for grinding your own wheat into flour. But did you know you can cook your whole wheat berries and eat them like rice or a hot cereal?  For those of you who don’t yet have a food mill, this is a fantastic way to get all that nutrition from whole wheat.

The Great Barley Experiment

Last night I did an extensive experiment with dehydrated cooked barley.  Once I had completed a series of photos (and eaten the results), I went to load it into the computer. To my disgust, I discovered my camera chip was still in the computer!  My SLR won’t take a pic if the chip is missing, but apparently the point-and-shoot will. Hmmm…

I fiddled around with the camera… don’t know why… and discovered it has an internal memory. My pics were there!  Yay!  Sooo…. I figured out how to transfer them to the chip and into the computer.

I wanted to find out about the cooked barley I had recently dehydrated.  I am quite fond of barley, but it takes a long time to cook.  Generally, I cook it in the crock-pot overnight.

I wondered if it would rehydrate like dehydrated cooked rice.  I started with ¼ cup of dehydrated barley and covered it with water.  It took about 30 minutes of simmering on very low heat before it was rehydrated, tender, and ready to eat. I decided that takes too long, although it is substantially less time than cooking it from the raw state.

Making the Best of Basics

This is an excellent book. If you can only afford one book, this is the one to buy.  I keep my copy of

Making the Best of Basics Family Preparedness Handbook  by James Talmage Stevens on hand at all times..  This is probably the first survivalist book I ever purchased.