Here we describe 3 wheat substitutes that anyone can grow, and might even be growing in your backyard right now! Wheat alternatives are great for when you want to reduce your reliance on the wheat supply chain, or just want to reduce the amount of wheat flour in your diet.

Wheat is a big part of the average diet. The average North American eats about 180 lb of wheat a year, accounting for up to 20% of all calories we consume. If you wanted grow your own, you would need around 3 bushels, or about 3000 square feet of garden space per person dedicated only to wheat. For most of us, that is just not feasible.

But, removing wheat from our diet completely isn’t the only way to deal with these issues. Let’s turn to the 3 R’s of food security: Resistance, Resilience, Redundancy.
Resistance is the ability to not be affected by change or pressure.
Resilience is the ability to recover from or to adjust to change or pressure.
Redundancy is preventing a single component from causing whole system failure through duplication

Deciding to grow your own wheat is a form of resistance to disturbances in the supply chain. Another way to reduce the amount of wheat you need is to switch from white flour to whole wheat flour. White flour only uses the endosperm of the grain, and whole wheat also uses the casing, or bran, allowing you to get over twice as much flour from the same amount of grain. We also resist disturbances to the wheat food chain by reducing our dependence on wheat through redundancy in the different types of grains, starches, and flours we buy, forage, and grow. Ideally you would replace wheat flour with alternative sources of flour adapted and resilient to your local climate.

Three different flours that we have experimented with include squash, bean, and dock weed.

We bake, then dehydrate squashes, this severely reduces the amount of space they take up in the pantry and increases their longevity. If you put the dehydrated chunks in a food grinder you essentially get flour. To keep the same consistency we have found that you can replace up to half the wheat flour in cakes and muffins, and ¼ of the flour in breads. Because pumpkin is very flavourful we find that we need to use less than other squashes like yellow squash or zucchini that have much less flavour to not overwhelm the dish. When using it for baking it is important to realize that squash flour weighs more than wheat flour so you need to use volumetric not weight based measurement.

Beans do not take a lot of space in the garden either because, like squash, you can grow the indeterminate varieties with vines up trellises. Beans, like all legumes, are also great for your soil. We use a mixture of different dried beans, which we grind up into a fine powder in the coffee grinder. We have made noodles that replace about 1/3 of the wheat flour in noodles, as well as only bean flour, in this case you use a lot more eggs, which is a great way to use up extra eggs from your chickens when they are going full swing in the spring/summer. The pasta tastes great, the only issue being that it crumbles easier than wheat pasta, so you can’t make as long of noodles.

The final flour we have experimented with is broadleaf and curly dock flour. This one is great as it doesn’t take up any garden space as it is a weed, and is likely already growing in your backyard. We leave the chaff on the seeds which grind into a flourlike consistency, but because the seeds are so small, they tend to stay whole. We have baked it in muffins, pancakes, waffles, and crackers, and tend to only replace ¼ of the flour because of the texture it adds.

These are three flour alternatives that we have grown or foraged on our own property. Let us know if you have used other flour substitutes that you grew yourself, as we are always interested in increasing our redundancy in flours as a way to reduce our reliance on wheat.

#Wilderstead #canadianhomesteaders

Image and video credits:
WHEAT FIELD:    • Growing Wheat For The First Time  
WHEAT KERNEL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Us...
CORN FIELD: Christian Fischer, CC BYSA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
SYMBIOTIC NITROGEN FIXING:    • Understanding Our Soil: The Nitrogen ...  

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