A few months ago I did a series of simple kitchen experiments / personal taste tests with several millets and posted about them here: little,/1 kodo,/2 and a combination of proso with pecans./3 Another one was broken or cracked pearl millet, with the size of grits. More on that now, with a bit of background. Pearl millet was my first "millet," in Togo (West Africa), and I ate quite a bit of it later in Mali - all of this from the late 1970s to mid 1980s. Except for longer or shorter later stints in that region, I never had pearl millet. Never found it in the US, until discovering "bajri" flour in an Indian market in Virginia in 2015. After that, I occasionally used pearl millet flour in making hot cereal, echoing faintly the "mɔni" porridge commonly eaten early in the day in Mali (as expressed in Bambara language). The flour is most often used in making "to" (toh), which is technically a "stiff porridge" of dough-like consistency, pieces of which are pulled off to dunk in a sauce to eat. However different "grinds" (coffee reference) of this grain are used in other ways - a somewhat fine grind is steamed as couscous ("basi" in Bambara), and a somewhat coarser grind boiled as another porridge called "seri." When I found a "broken pearl millet (grits)" product online, from an Indian company called Shastha Foods (it's in the attached image), I decided to see if I could duplicate either couscous or seri with it. Here are the results, such as they are (I'm not much of a cook - I can beat the same set of drums and fill the ears, but it desn't always count as music): 1. First tried it in the same small rice-cooker used for the other millets. That didn't work too well (stuck together), so I recycled it into a hot cereal, which was fine 2. Next, I tried to steam it, which worked okay. That's what you see in the white bowl in the photo. However it was coarser than the couscous I remembered from Mali, and didn't fluff so well (I hope later to try a "semolina" or "polenta" type grind) 3. Finally I tried it as hot cereal, and that worked well. These days I actually might combine it with rolled oats or steel-cut oats for a hearty breakfast with an interesting taste combination. A quick note on cracking millets: I think it is only done with what are sometimes called the "major" millets - i.e., sorghum and pearl millet - adding to the ways in which one can cook and serve them. It doesn't seem to make much sense for the smaller millets. Of course any millet can be milled to a flour. I don't know if it's possible to roll millets as one would oats, but that might add another dimension. I have seen millet flakes ("flocons" in French) for sale,/4 /5 but not clear on the process by which they are made.
From one description (in French) it sounds more like pre-cooking (by steam) with no mention of any mechanical process other than dehulling (these are apparently proso, not pearl)./6 I think that making millet flakes as one would corn flakes is a different process entirely./7 Any further info on rolling or flaking millets would be welcome.
Don Don Osborn, PhD (East Lansing, MI, US North American Millets Alliance don@milletsalliance.org Notes: 1. https://lists.millets2023.space/pipermail/collab/2022-May/000052.html 2. https://lists.millets2023.space/pipermail/collab/2022-August/000082.html 3. https://lists.millets2023.space/pipermail/collab/2022-May/000059.html 4. https://www.celnat.fr/en/ref/millet-flakes-en 5. https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/7610200074201/flocons-de-millet-migr... 6. https://litchivanille.com/2019/02/24/flocons-de-millet/ 7. https://nativefoodstore.com/Overseas/shop-2/millet-flakes-millet-breakfast-c...
