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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 14, 2012 7:23:10 GMT -5
Flint makes: * Polenta aka "grits" * Hominy * Masa harina de maiz. You have to soak it in lye or lime, then wet-grind it. Use fresh, or dried and powdered. * preceding makes tortillas. Flint is hard to grind. Michel says grind it fine anyway and use it for corn flour in lieu of "flour corn", which is easier to grind but harder to dry down in a damp climate (like, say, mine). Then you make batter breads with the flour. Might be better to always grind it wet, and turn that directly into a batter. That way you avoid the issue of phytates (anti-nutrients). The whole grain probably keeps better intact than flour, anyway. I haven't actually tried this yet... As someone who HAS tried to grind Glass Gem corn (as I mentioned, it's a pretty common strain to sell as "Indian Corn" up here. I will say getting a good grind off it is difficult, so difficult I haven't actually accomplished it yet. Glass Gem is about as close to a pure "hard starch" corn as you can get (one of the reasons it has that translucency). So when you grind it it tends to not so much "grind" as "shatter until the fragments are small enough to fall out from the grinder". You wind up with meal that is VERY coarse; too coarse to be really pleasant to eat (the texture is not so much that of flour or meal as of rough grade beach sand) And the cooking doesn't soften it much. You can make tortillas out of it, but they're very coarse, rough tortillas, and I'd imagine that prolonged consuption of them will wind up leaving your teeth with the same sort of wear patterns that are normally seen on Egyptian mummies, due to their barley bread having so much grit in it.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Nov 14, 2012 7:47:39 GMT -5
The best use for pure hard starch corn is as polenta. Boil one part corn meal with 3 parts water for 10 minutes and then drop it into a haybox cooker for a couple hours. Then stir the resulting mush and pour into a pan to set up.
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Post by Walk on Nov 14, 2012 10:06:06 GMT -5
haha. one pops flints. one grinds flints, and i eat flints as sweet corn. Are you saying that you pick immature, green flint corn to eat as sweet corn?
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Post by 12540dumont on Nov 14, 2012 12:58:22 GMT -5
Well, no matter how pretty, if it doesn't grind into a beautiful cornmeal or corn flour, I'm not going to plant it.
One of the Italian corns I grew was so hard, that it was like trying to grind rocks. It did not even make a good polenta as I could not get the grind consistent. I did lots of sifting and lots of grinding.
But it sure is purdy. Reminds me of some of the girls I met in school. Verra Purdy, but not much use except to look at.
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 14, 2012 16:30:04 GMT -5
Well, no matter how pretty, if it doesn't grind into a beautiful cornmeal or corn flour, I'm not going to plant it. And regrettably it really doesn't. In fact, crucify me for saying it, but I'm not 100% sure ANY full palette corn (one that has most to all of the possible colors of endosperm, aluerone, germ etc. possible for corn) can ever make a truly visually attactive meal, especially one like Glass gem where no color predominates. The various colors mix together, and the resultant meal usually winds up as some shade of grey or brown (you could, of course, get around this by seperating the kernels by color before you grind them, but that is very time consuming and to little or no real point) Such a corn does have advantages nutritionally (since it has every concievable color, it has whatever nutritional advantages each color brings in proportion) but that brown to grey meal tone is the tradeoff for that. One of the Italian corns I grew was so hard, that it was like trying to grind rocks. It did not even make a good polenta as I could not get the grind consistent. I did lots of sifting and lots of grinding. But it sure is purdy. Reminds me of some of the girls I met in school. Verra Purdy, but not much use except to look at. Much my own opinion. The "grade A" stippled corn I like to play around with is (mostly) a scion of a corn of the same sort of super flint type as Glass Gem (I usually like to think of them as "crystal flints") just with the stipple gene and (usually) only three colors (white, yellow and purple). Which means is absolutely beautiful visually, but not of much use as an actual foodstuff (or why I havent tried to plant it for 2-3 years) If I wan't corn to hand on my door, I'd go with a crystal. If I wan't corn to go in my belly, I'd probably plant a "shell" flint (a flint with a thin wall of hard starch all around the kernel just under the alueurone, and soft starch all the rest of the way through the kernel) since those give me the best of both world (the mold and pest resistance that flints often have (the hard starch is often a good barrier, as many insects have almost as much trouble getting into it as we do) with the maximum amount of soft starch for finer meal and flour and easier griding.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Nov 14, 2012 16:52:17 GMT -5
yep. If picked in the milk stage i find them perfectly fine as sweet corn. Perhaps some day i will plant a dedicated planting of sweet corn again, but it is an advantage to be selecting my indian corn toward glassy early drying flints because 1. they store well, and 2. if they dry early to very hard starch then the squirrels and racoons skip over those cobs just in case they eat some of the others.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Nov 15, 2012 7:08:02 GMT -5
Holly, What brand of grinder do you have? I've found that so far our County Living can handle the hardest flint I had this year which was Byron. I did finally figure out that the "Corn and Bean" auger attachment was actually getting in the way. Grinding worked much smoother after I switched back to the normal auger spring. It is much harder to grind flint corn than wheat for sure, but I get an even grind.
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Post by Walk on Nov 15, 2012 9:30:06 GMT -5
yep. If picked in the milk stage i find them perfectly fine as sweet corn. Perhaps some day i will plant a dedicated planting of sweet corn again, but it is an advantage to be selecting my indian corn toward glassy early drying flints because 1. they store well, and 2. if they dry early to very hard starch then the squirrels and racoons skip over those cobs just in case they eat some of the others. Would this work with any flint? We grow Roy's Abenaki Calais and this possibility has got me intrigued.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Nov 15, 2012 13:41:12 GMT -5
Probably. Its certainly worth experimenting with. There is less time when they are edible before starch conversion, when compared with sweet corns, but its fine for me.
There probably bad tasting corns out there whether they be flint flour or dent, but i would think many would work and worth trying once or twice even if its just for fun.
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Post by 12540dumont on Nov 15, 2012 13:49:35 GMT -5
An ancient CS BELL....
Remember a new mill, still and greenhouse are on my honey can I please have it list...
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Post by Walk on Nov 16, 2012 11:32:31 GMT -5
I'm going to have to try some flint in the green stage next summer. We have a Diamont mill that I bought in the 1970's, back when it was somewhat affordable. They were made in Denmark then. I bought 3 of them to get a dealership and split them with some friends so we could each get them at cost. It has been used all these years on the original regular steel plates and still works fine, although we did put a motor on it about 25 years ago. It does take 2 passes to grind the flint corn finely since it's so hard. It's the only grain that we've run into that situation with.
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Post by Darth Slater on Nov 16, 2012 20:29:43 GMT -5
What would be a grinder you could use that would make this or any other hard types into flower? I am sure it would be pricey, but there has to be a home grinder that could do this?
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Post by oxbowfarm on Nov 16, 2012 20:46:23 GMT -5
I've had good luck with flint corn with my hand crank Country Living Mill. They aren't cheap but they aren't as much as a Diamant.
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Post by gray on Jan 22, 2013 16:05:54 GMT -5
Okay folks post your experiences with glass gem corn for 2012. Who has been growing it and have you used it for eating purposes.
My wife has made some great cornbread with it. We find it grinds into a very nice easy for flint to grind baby blue flour.
It doesnt pop well but the old maids are crunchy like a corn nut and it has much better flavor than the store bought.
Also any internet hype experiences with glass gem. I was talking to Tim of Oxbow Farm recently discussing the phenomenon that it has become on ebay and other internet sites.
Would love for someone to give an accurate history of the heritage and someone talk about the now famous but elusive Carl Barnes who would know first hand from him the history.
Well just trying to bump this topic to see what experiences and first hand knowledge might be out there.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jan 22, 2013 17:48:14 GMT -5
Gray: I grew your Glass Gem corn this summer. I'm curious to know: where you got the seed from? Do you have any photos to share?
In my garden this summer Glass Gem required ~2400 GDD:50F, so the seed companies would call it a 110 to 120 day corn. But I only picked the earliest maturing cobs, and about 2/3 of the crop didn't get harvested due to being immature. So maybe as much as 130 days to maturity? I saved seeds from the earliest maturing cobs, and from the butt end of every cob. Trying to move the population to a bit shorter season for my garden.
There was tremendous diversity among plant growth patterns, and maturity times. Grasshoppers flocked to the Glass Gem patch and chewed the heck out of the leaves which is unusual for corn in my fields.
It tillered heavily, and the tillers produced lots of cobs. The plants on the end of the row produced as many as 15 cobs per plant. If I really wanted to increase the seed, I'd give each plant around 6 to 9 square feet of growing space.
I tried popping it. It expands around 7 times with lots of old maids. (It might go up to 10X if I adjusted moisture to 14%.) I think that the variety could easily be turned into a good popping corn if someone hand-sorted the kernels before planting. (I think that I'm willing for the upcoming growing season.)
I acknowledge that the blue colors of glass gem are rare in food crops, but I think that as a food, it's just corn. It's been interesting to watch Glass Gem seed on eBay as it flows from growers, and then gets re-listed by people pretending to be growers, and then gets re-listed again by people who are hyping the newest fad. And the ad copy gets more hyped the further away it gets from the primary growers.
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