Fall in Love With Millet

Millet is a lightweight whole grain flour with a texture like corn. It is something like Bisquick. It rises well and makes recipes soft and flaky. It is a great all-purpose flour.

Millet is very popular in Africa and contains B vitamins, including B17 (anti-cancer), calcium, protein, manganese, magnesium,phosphorus and antioxidants. It is useful in preventing diabetes, heart disease, repair body tissues and preventing kidney stones. It is not an acid forming food so is easy to digest.

Storing Millet

Millet flour does go rancid quickly so the flour should be kept in the freezer or buy the millet seeds and grind in the coffee grinder when needed. Millet grain can also be cooked as a cereal for breakfast or used in replacement for couscous or in recipes like tablouleh.

Cooking Millet

To cook it this way it is a 2:1 ratio of water to grain, much like rice or oatmeal. Millet does take longer to cook than some grains so expect at least 30 minutes unless you have soaked it overnight. Soaking does not do much for the breaking down of the millet as millet is low in phytase but it will lessen the cooking time needed so sometimes I soak my millet before making for a breakfast food.

My favorite recipe for millet is Millet Biscuits that I found at the website www.celiacteen.com. In my search for gluten free biscuits that taste like biscuits should, this was the only recipe I found that compares to the biscuits I used to make. These are wonderfully chewy and melt in your mouth.

Millet Biscuits

This is an original recipe by Lauren of Celiac Teen.

Ingredients

1 cup millet flour
1 cup tapioca flour ( I have substituted arrowroot, potato starch or cornstarch when I don't have the tapoica and it came out fine.)
1/2 cup sweet rice flour – critical ingredient
1 1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1 1/2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick cold unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups buttermilk

Steps

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a cookie sheet with a silpat or parchment paper.

Whisk together dry ingredients. Cut in butter with pastry blender until butter is the size of small peas.

Stir buttermilk into dough until it just comes together. You can roll out the dough and cut into squares or you can just plop a spoonful on a greased cookie sheet.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until slightly brown on the bottom.

If there are any leftover these are still good the next day (unlike many gluten free recipes).

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Jennifer Dages

Jennifer is a happily married homeschooling mother of 4 who lives in small town Pennsylvania.She blogs at The Entwife's Journal and at Purposeful Nutrition.She is also an RN who is working to build a health business through blogging, speaking, and health coaching.