where we’ve just finished planting corn, rice, oats, wheat and buckwheat on 30 farms in the region known to local growers as “the big S”—check out the map.
We’ve been cooking up a storm, too.
Visit AnsonMills.com and find new
products and new recipes.
Farro has got to be the most outgoing grain we know, a real party animal—fit to mix with nearly anything, sweet or savory, hot or cold—and Anson Mills Farro Piccolo, available to our retail customers for the first time, is the oldest and rarest of Italian farros. About one third the size of Anson Mills Slow-Roasted Farro and featuring lighter and fresher flavor notes—think of farro piccolo as farro light or summer farro. We offer two fabulous recipes using this diminutive grain, Farro Tabbouleh and Farro Succotash.
Nothing says summer quite as exotically as soba—Japanese-style buckwheat noodles. The best among them have heft, presence, and a ton of flavor without even being hot—no small accomplishment. Anson Mills Rustic Ni-Hachi Sobakoh, a blend of finely milled buckwheat flour and the highest quality pasta flour we make, produces incomparable soba noodles—better, we daresay, than most served in Japanese restaurants (which come straight out of a box). Commercial buckwheat flour is beaten to death during processing and extruded by the ton to make soba that is unremarkable in texture and flavor. We worked hard to make this recipe easy. If you love soba, you’ll want to make Soba with Shoyu-Mirin Sauce, with a sauce based on traditional Japanese dashi, or broth.
Let’s get liquid with grains! Horchata, a creamy, chilled rice beverage that originated in Persia and then made its way to Mexico and the East Coast of the United States from Spain, could be called the ultimate summer cooler. Our recipe for horchata calls for Anson MillsCarolina Gold Rice Flour and almonds—steeped, pulverized, sweetened, and chilled. And if you’re of a mind to add a splash of rum, you’ll have one of the best cocktails on the planet.
More Recipes with More Photos
Some of our new recipes call for techniques that are easier to convey in pictures than in words. And so we’ve added photographs that will show you exactly how to cut a beautiful brunoise of vegetables for our Tabbouleh and how to shape the dough for Crumiri, (pictured below). Our detailed photos practically take you by the hand, demonstrating how to execute each crucial step.
In this innovative take on a classic dessert—Strawberry Shortcake—we replaced the usual all-purpose flour used to make the biscuits with Anson Mills Carolina Gold Rice Flour. The result is a biscuit that is entirely wheat-free, as well as incredibly tender and light, with a remarkably fine granulation—the angel food cake of biscuits.
Also making their debut on our Web site are two recipe variations on Crumiri, the fabled cornmeal cookies from northern Italy. These beautifully simple butter cookies, made with Anson Mills Antebellum Fine Yellow Cornmeal, are perfect at meal’s end with a demitasse of strong coffee and a small glass of Marsala.
Looking Ahead We’re excited about a couple of heirloom wheat varieties arising from our research on the history of grains: Sonora and Red Fife. Sonora is a wafer or communion wheat brought to California missions by the Jesuits in the mid-18th century. Widely planted throughout the United States up until the 1950s, it has been out of production since. A lovely, naturally white wheat, Sonora produces an equally lovely, white wheat flour with a real knack for being rolled thin into crackers and tortillas. Red Fife, undeclared brother of our own Red May, is the first uniquely American bread wheat—an improved German strain that came unidentified into the United States from Canada in the 1840s. Red Fife has a spicy flavor spectrum and contains traces of carotene, which lends a bronze cast to the crumb of goods baked with it. Anson Mills has begun to blend these two fine varieties to create a beautiful flour named Anson Mills Trigo Fuerte (trigo fuerte means strong wheat) destined for tortillas, focaccia—and no doubt many other fine things. Look for recipes featuring Trigo Fuerte in our next newsletter.
