Delicious Nutritious Millet - The New Quinoa

Millet Is the New Quinoa: Versatile, delicious & nutritious like quinoa, but way cheaper & greener

Most of us in N. America see millet as bird seed, or hippy food. In other places, it’s grown as animal feed, and it’s being looked at as a possible ethanol source.

But millet is so much more!

In many parts of the world, mostly India, China and Asia, millet has been a staple food for thousands of years, for excellent reasons.

Millet is Seriously Nutritious

According to Care2.com, millet is alkaline, pre-biotic, hydrates your colon, has seratonin to elevate your mood, is high in magnesium, niacin and protein, heart healthy, cholesterol lowering, low glycemic, low fat, non-allergenic and gluten free.

Quinoa has similar nutritional advantages, except that it’s higher in fat - not a bad thing - and has 8 g of complete protein per 1 cup cooked while millet has 6 g ordinary protein. Big deal - add a few legumes, a little oil, and the score is even.

However, quinoa has serious disadvantages. For one thing, it costs on average 5 times as much as millet, plus its carbon footprint and ethical profile aren’t great.

Millet is Cheap, Ethical and Green

One reason that millet is cheap compared to quinoa is that it’s not in big demand in this country as people food. That may be about to change, but it probably won’t increase the cost much.

That’s because millet grows just about anywhere, so it doesn’t have to be shipped thousands of miles, raising the carbon footprint and depriving Andean small farmers of their traditional food source.

Millet also doesn’t need special processing to be edible, like quinoa does.

In fact, we can grow millet on tiny farms and back yard gardens, process it ourselves and eat it or sell it at our local farmer’s markets.

All of that makes millet a very green and ethical food - for people, including hippies.

Millet is Perfect People Food

One big reason millet has been a popular food for thousands of years is that it’s so versatile.

Millet can stand in for other grains, such as rice, wheat, or quinoa in many recipes.

Millet cooks very much like rice, takes about 20 minutes to cook, and can be prepared in a pressure cooker or a rice cooker.

The more water you add to it and the longer you cook it, the softer and creamier millet gets. It can take on the texture of mashed potatoes (think baby food), or it can be be dry, with separate grains, like toasted millet.

Millet can be breakfast, lunch or dinner depending on what you do to it. The fact that it’s gluten free is a bonus.

Here are a few millet cooking ideas:

Use cooked millet as a base for sauces and gravies, such as Cashew Veggie Sauce, or Chili Beans in Vegetarian Gravy, or Mushroom Leek Sauce.

Use cooked millet instead of cooked quinoa or steel cut oats to make breakfast cereal - just add milk, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, cinnamon, salt, or whatever you like in your cereal. Bring to a boil, simmer until thick, eat. Yum!

Or start with raw millet, and cook it all overnight on low in the crock pot, so breakfast will be ready when you get up in the morning.

Add cooked millet to stir fries, soups and stews, just as you’d add cooked quinoa or rice or bulgar. Or use raw millet to make millet pilaf, the same way you’d make rice pilaf.

With its neutral flavor and light color, millet flour is inexpensive, and a great gluten free baking staple.

Use millet flour as a base to make your own all purpose gluten free flour mix for quick breads, muffins or pancakes or even yeasted gf bread if you’re brave and optimistic! I use millet flour in flatbread, which we eat almost daily in place of yeasted bread (we gave away the toaster).

Basic Millet Cooking Tips and Video

Millet is Super Easy to Grow:

Farmers in N. America have been trying to grow quinoa, hoping to cash in on the quinoa craze, but as NPR points out, quinoa is very picky about where it grows, and growing conditions have to be just right.

The ideal quinoa growing conditions are high in the Andes mountains in Bolivia, which is part of the reason why quinoa costs up to $8 per pound and has a lousy carbon footprint.

Plus removing the bitter saponin coating to make quinoa edible requires special equipment.

Millet, on the Other Hand, is easy to grow, wherever summers are long and hot. According to Heirloom Organics, millet can be planted in any soil that can produce corn. Normal average rainfall should take care of watering requirements to enable the grass to reach optimum growth.

For harvesting millet, “cut the mature seed cluster from the stem….the mature seeds will be swollen and release easily from the cluster by simple rubbing. They are very small, roundish with pointed ends and light wheat color. Allow the seed head to dry for a few days to facilitate easy removal of the seeds. Once the seeds are released from the stem allow them to dry for a few more days before packing.”

Millet is easy enough for back yard gardeners to grow - for the birds, as this Wiki How article suggests - but why not eat it yourself?

Millet is just as good for me as quinoa, I can do everything with millet that I can do with quinoa, plus millet tastes great, and it’s so cheap and green.

All that is powerful incentive to switch my allegiance from quinoa to millet.

I Hereby Declare! Millet is The New Quinoa!

Judith Kingsbury, Savvy Vegetarian