Farro. It is one of the oldest domesticated crops. One of its varieties, emmer wheat, has been found in archeological sites dating back 15,000 years. For millenia, farro fed the peoples of the Mediterranean and the Near East as a daily staple.
What is it? The short answer is that farro is a variety of wheat. The long answer is botanical and semantic. Farro’s difference from modern, commonly grown wheat, is that it has a strong hull that doesn’t just fall off during threshing. This makes farro require extra work in processing, but it also relates to farro’s hardiness. Farro has survived so long, and continues to be cultivated, because of its reliable yields in the mountainous regions of Italy. The name farro is translated variously into English as einkor, emmer, or spelt because it generally signifies all of these varieties of hulled wheat.
The Italians use the dried, oblong, amber-brown grains in a variety of food preparations—from minestrone, to cold grain salads, or breads and pastas after the grains have been ground into flour. When eaten whole, in soups or salads, farro is cooked al dente, so that it has a toothsome springiness.
This springiness is one of the reasons I love it. I love it for its versatility, its deep nutty, wheaty flavor, and its incredible nutritional punch (it has more than twice the protein and fiber of the most common wheat, which loses even more in refinement). I love farro, too, for the role it could play in a future of sustainable agriculture. It is a low-yielding crop that likes craggy hillsides, and arid spots, in addition to sun-and-rain-drenched fields. That first characteristic is why it is virtually unknown in factory-farm-happy places like the Midwest U.S., where high yielding crops rule (but not for long, we fear, because of their reliance on costly inputs and/or bioengineering). These latter characteristics, and its nutritional content, are what have made it a staple crop in the past and what may make it a necessary crop in the future, when climate change forces us to use these hardy ancient crops that can survive where g.m.o.s can’t.
I’m going to quote a long Wikipedia paragraph, because I like the description. Even more, though, I love the vocabulary lesson:
Like einkorn and spelt wheats, emmer is a hulled wheat. In other words, it has strong glumes (husks) that enclose the grains, and a semi-brittle rachis. On threshing, a hulled wheat spike breaks up into spikelets. These require milling or pounding to release the grains from the glumes.
Wild emmer wheat spikelets effectively self-cultivate by propelling themselves mechanically into soils with their awns. During a period of increased humidity during the night, the awns of the spikelet become erect and draw together, and in the process push the grain into the soil. During the daytime the humidity drops and the awns slacken back again; however fine silica hairs on the awns act as hooks in the soil and prevent the spikelets from reversing back out again. During the course of alternating stages of daytime and nighttime humidity, the awns’ pumping movements, which resemble a swimming frog kick, will drill the spikelet as much as an inch or more into the soil.
Fascinating. But what’s to be done with this clever grain? Tonight I cooked some soup, the basis of which was farro mixed with green and red lentils. I especially love a lentil soup jazzed up with lemon, sweetened with carrots, and spiced with cumin. Mona and Chris and their crew in the Rome Sustainable Food Project kitchen have been making some amazing salads with farro. My favorite, so far, included fennel roasted with chopped whole lemons (rind and all) and tossed with some chopped bitter green, farro, salt and pepper, and plenty of flavorful olive oil. At a potluck at one of Jack’s school friend’s apartments, I tasted a warm farro salad featuring roasted, nicely caramelized chunks of zucca, the ubiquitous big orange squash in the Roman markets all fall. This cool Halloween weekend calls for farro with something orange….
The Roving Locavore 