Xenia, endosperm, and visual selection
Sept 26, 2015 7:18:35 GMT -5
nicollas, maicerochico, and 4 more like this
Post by oxbowfarm on Sept 26, 2015 7:18:35 GMT -5
My oldest corn breeding project is my flint corn. It has undergone quite a few changes of direction as my knowledge and interests has changed. And now I'm redirecting it again after seeing the results of this years grow out.
The first corn project I ever did was a mass cross of OP dent corns, that I believe I began in 2005. It included Reid's, Bloody Butcher, Early Butler, Oaxacan Green, and Wapsie Valley. This ended up becoming a very interesting multicolored dent, but I didn't use it for anything other than chicken and cattle feed. We did not yet have a grain grinder and/or a masa grinder to convert the corn into useable human food. I grew the dent grex for a number of years in small patches till I purchased Carol Deppe's book "the Resilient Gardener". Carol's discussion of the culinary properties of flint and flour corns convinced me to try them vs the dent. So I acquired some of Carol's Cascade Series as well as Abenaki/Roy's Calais and Byron yellow flint from other sources. I was concerned that Carol's selection of the Cascade Series in the Pacific Northwest had caused it to lose some adaptation to the northeast conditions so I wanted to cross it back with the original parent varieties.
Continued reading of the Resilient Gardener caused me to become very interested in the concept Carol describes of different corns having different flavors associated with different colors of pericarp. She describes this phenomenon in both her flint and in her flour corn varieties. So I became intrigued by this concept as well. It just so happened that I was actively searching GRIN for corn accessions and I came across Bronze Beauty PI 645583. Unlike most of the accessions in GRIN, there are a large number of excellent photographs of the corn in the ear and as shelled cobs, enough to make me recognize that the corn had incredible pericarp color diversity. So I decided to incorporate Bronze Beauty into my flint to increase the range of pericarp color and potentially flavors. After growing it out, I can attest to the incredible diversity of color this corn can display in the pericarp, to the point that what I believe is going on is due to a range of color modifying genes vs individual genes for each color. There are too many different shades, a spectrum of brown-bronze-red-pink-tan-cream.
So my current flint corn population is a still segregating population founded on Abenaki/Byron both directly and through the Cascade Series combined with Bronze Beauty Flint. It is primarily a classic 8-row flint with a very commonly higher row numbers still expressing from Bronze Beauty. There's a lot of white endosperm from Bronze Beauty and from Cascade Creapcap which I also included in one of the early years.
The issue at this point is that the longer I grow and eat corn, the more my family and I have discovered the ways it is easiest to include in our diets. I originally began my flint corn project closely basing it on Carol's description of the way in which she grows and uses corn in the Resilient Gardener. Carol eats large amounts of cornbread and polenta and she uses different colored pericarp corns for different types of cornbread and polenta. She grinds her cornmeal in an electric mill for cornbread and in a Corona type masa grinder for polenta grits. We do not have an electric mill, we have a hand crank country living mill and a Corona type masa grinder. I have never been able to get a result I am happy with using Carol's "Universal Skillet Bread" recipe. Corn is not easy to grind in the Country Living mill, either flour or flint. The feed rate is slow, and it is hard work. This is true whether or not you are using the "corn and bean auger" on the shaft or not. Trust me I am very familiar with the use of our CLM. The other big discovery is that I do not detect the flavor differences in pericarp colors that Carol describes in her writings. To me, it all tastes the same.
I am not trying to say that Carol is wrong, or that her recipes don't work, or criticize her writings in any way. I just am describing the learning process we've gone through as we continue to grow these corns. It turns out, the way we like to use corn and the way Carol uses corn in her books are pretty different. This is affecting the direction I want to go with the flint corn in the future.
Our favorite way to eat corn turns out to be nixtamalized and made into tamales and tortillas. Cornbread and polenta are very minor occasional items in our diet. So I need to select our corn for better, easier use for our family. The question is how best to do that. What do I want the corn to become, vs what it is now?
Right now, my flint has some weaknesses and strengths. On the plus side, it is early, relatively well adapted to grow direct seeded with low fertility and occasional dry periods in my acidic gravel soil. It makes a nice tortilla as is, and is quite resistant to ear rots etc.
The minus column is fairly long though. The corn is lower yielding than I would like. The plants are small, weak, and lodge easily when compared to my old dent or my current flour corn. The flint is VERY susceptible to Northern Leaf Blight and this may be a factor in the lodging issues. And there is way too much colored pericarp in the corn.
The downside for me with the colored pericarps is twofold.
First, colored pericarp does not nixtamalize easily in my experience. The pigment seems to act in some fashion to block or neutralize the alkali. It takes longer to nixtamalize a colored pericarp than a clear, and it is much more difficult to wash out the pericarps that remain.
Here's a batch of red pericarp flint corn after several rinses.
and here's a picture of the strips of red pericarp, clear pericarp does not come off in strips like this, it dissolves into fuzzy slime.
Second, pericarp colors prevent me from seeing what is going on with the endosperm of individual kernels. The neat thing about corn is that xenia potentially allows you to select individual kernels off the cob based on their expressed phenotype. But only if you can see it.
One of the really incredible corns I've grown the last two years is Cateto Sulino thanks to maicerochico. This corn, in addition to being a great tasting glassy hard flint, is an "orange corn" with fabulously high carotene levels in the endosperm. It is possible to see the varying levels of carotene being expressed in the Cateto Sulino and visually select for higher carotene content, but once again, you have to be able to see the endosperm to do this. I am starting to get some of the flint X Cateto crosses harvested and you can see the range of colors showing on many of the cobs. I don't have a picture of this yet. Here's pic of some 2015 Cateto with some 2015 Mexident (another awesome corn I want to become part of the flint project) you can see the bright orange of this corn. I want all my flint to have this type of nutritional content.
The challenge for me is that the pericarp genetics are widespread in my original grex, and sometimes they are extremely subtle. It is easy to select out a dark brown ear, or a red ear, but my flint has a huge amount of light/tinted pericarp colors- tans, creams, and pinks. It isn't clear to me if these tinted pericarps affect nixtamalization at all but they definitely can make a pale yellow endosperm look much darker and more vibrant. So I'm having to cull through the corn extra hard in bright sunlight to detect the subtle difference between clear and tinted pericarps.
My goal is to never deliberately plant a colored pericarp kernel ever again, but eliminating the pericarp colors completely would be pretty much impossible without starting over with different corn, or doing way more hand pollinating and self pollinating than I have any interest in doing. I think I can carry out the kind of selections for dark orange, flinty endosperm visually even in the current corn population. I really don't want to start over again. I do like a lot of the things that Northern Flint genetics bring to the table, and I don't need the corns to be perfect, just much adapted to the way we've come to use corn.
The first corn project I ever did was a mass cross of OP dent corns, that I believe I began in 2005. It included Reid's, Bloody Butcher, Early Butler, Oaxacan Green, and Wapsie Valley. This ended up becoming a very interesting multicolored dent, but I didn't use it for anything other than chicken and cattle feed. We did not yet have a grain grinder and/or a masa grinder to convert the corn into useable human food. I grew the dent grex for a number of years in small patches till I purchased Carol Deppe's book "the Resilient Gardener". Carol's discussion of the culinary properties of flint and flour corns convinced me to try them vs the dent. So I acquired some of Carol's Cascade Series as well as Abenaki/Roy's Calais and Byron yellow flint from other sources. I was concerned that Carol's selection of the Cascade Series in the Pacific Northwest had caused it to lose some adaptation to the northeast conditions so I wanted to cross it back with the original parent varieties.
Continued reading of the Resilient Gardener caused me to become very interested in the concept Carol describes of different corns having different flavors associated with different colors of pericarp. She describes this phenomenon in both her flint and in her flour corn varieties. So I became intrigued by this concept as well. It just so happened that I was actively searching GRIN for corn accessions and I came across Bronze Beauty PI 645583. Unlike most of the accessions in GRIN, there are a large number of excellent photographs of the corn in the ear and as shelled cobs, enough to make me recognize that the corn had incredible pericarp color diversity. So I decided to incorporate Bronze Beauty into my flint to increase the range of pericarp color and potentially flavors. After growing it out, I can attest to the incredible diversity of color this corn can display in the pericarp, to the point that what I believe is going on is due to a range of color modifying genes vs individual genes for each color. There are too many different shades, a spectrum of brown-bronze-red-pink-tan-cream.
So my current flint corn population is a still segregating population founded on Abenaki/Byron both directly and through the Cascade Series combined with Bronze Beauty Flint. It is primarily a classic 8-row flint with a very commonly higher row numbers still expressing from Bronze Beauty. There's a lot of white endosperm from Bronze Beauty and from Cascade Creapcap which I also included in one of the early years.
The issue at this point is that the longer I grow and eat corn, the more my family and I have discovered the ways it is easiest to include in our diets. I originally began my flint corn project closely basing it on Carol's description of the way in which she grows and uses corn in the Resilient Gardener. Carol eats large amounts of cornbread and polenta and she uses different colored pericarp corns for different types of cornbread and polenta. She grinds her cornmeal in an electric mill for cornbread and in a Corona type masa grinder for polenta grits. We do not have an electric mill, we have a hand crank country living mill and a Corona type masa grinder. I have never been able to get a result I am happy with using Carol's "Universal Skillet Bread" recipe. Corn is not easy to grind in the Country Living mill, either flour or flint. The feed rate is slow, and it is hard work. This is true whether or not you are using the "corn and bean auger" on the shaft or not. Trust me I am very familiar with the use of our CLM. The other big discovery is that I do not detect the flavor differences in pericarp colors that Carol describes in her writings. To me, it all tastes the same.
I am not trying to say that Carol is wrong, or that her recipes don't work, or criticize her writings in any way. I just am describing the learning process we've gone through as we continue to grow these corns. It turns out, the way we like to use corn and the way Carol uses corn in her books are pretty different. This is affecting the direction I want to go with the flint corn in the future.
Our favorite way to eat corn turns out to be nixtamalized and made into tamales and tortillas. Cornbread and polenta are very minor occasional items in our diet. So I need to select our corn for better, easier use for our family. The question is how best to do that. What do I want the corn to become, vs what it is now?
Right now, my flint has some weaknesses and strengths. On the plus side, it is early, relatively well adapted to grow direct seeded with low fertility and occasional dry periods in my acidic gravel soil. It makes a nice tortilla as is, and is quite resistant to ear rots etc.
The minus column is fairly long though. The corn is lower yielding than I would like. The plants are small, weak, and lodge easily when compared to my old dent or my current flour corn. The flint is VERY susceptible to Northern Leaf Blight and this may be a factor in the lodging issues. And there is way too much colored pericarp in the corn.
The downside for me with the colored pericarps is twofold.
First, colored pericarp does not nixtamalize easily in my experience. The pigment seems to act in some fashion to block or neutralize the alkali. It takes longer to nixtamalize a colored pericarp than a clear, and it is much more difficult to wash out the pericarps that remain.
Here's a batch of red pericarp flint corn after several rinses.
and here's a picture of the strips of red pericarp, clear pericarp does not come off in strips like this, it dissolves into fuzzy slime.
Second, pericarp colors prevent me from seeing what is going on with the endosperm of individual kernels. The neat thing about corn is that xenia potentially allows you to select individual kernels off the cob based on their expressed phenotype. But only if you can see it.
One of the really incredible corns I've grown the last two years is Cateto Sulino thanks to maicerochico. This corn, in addition to being a great tasting glassy hard flint, is an "orange corn" with fabulously high carotene levels in the endosperm. It is possible to see the varying levels of carotene being expressed in the Cateto Sulino and visually select for higher carotene content, but once again, you have to be able to see the endosperm to do this. I am starting to get some of the flint X Cateto crosses harvested and you can see the range of colors showing on many of the cobs. I don't have a picture of this yet. Here's pic of some 2015 Cateto with some 2015 Mexident (another awesome corn I want to become part of the flint project) you can see the bright orange of this corn. I want all my flint to have this type of nutritional content.
The challenge for me is that the pericarp genetics are widespread in my original grex, and sometimes they are extremely subtle. It is easy to select out a dark brown ear, or a red ear, but my flint has a huge amount of light/tinted pericarp colors- tans, creams, and pinks. It isn't clear to me if these tinted pericarps affect nixtamalization at all but they definitely can make a pale yellow endosperm look much darker and more vibrant. So I'm having to cull through the corn extra hard in bright sunlight to detect the subtle difference between clear and tinted pericarps.
My goal is to never deliberately plant a colored pericarp kernel ever again, but eliminating the pericarp colors completely would be pretty much impossible without starting over with different corn, or doing way more hand pollinating and self pollinating than I have any interest in doing. I think I can carry out the kind of selections for dark orange, flinty endosperm visually even in the current corn population. I really don't want to start over again. I do like a lot of the things that Northern Flint genetics bring to the table, and I don't need the corns to be perfect, just much adapted to the way we've come to use corn.