Abra Berens uncovers a world of options in pantry workhorses

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Our cookbook of the week is Grist: A Practical Guide to Cooking Grains, Beans, Seeds, and Legumes by Abra Berens. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Cranberry bean salad with roasted carrots and mojo de ajo; hoecakes with fresh mozzarella, tomato and soybeans; and flaky rye and three cheese galette with asparagus salad.

Packed away in bags or cans, grains and legumes can go unnoticed — even unappreciated. In their hard, dry state, they seem indestructible and unchanging. Ready to be revived with a splash of water, though, they offer the promise of a meal. It doesn’t need to be tonight, this week or even this month.

There’s a comforting reliability in that long-term promise and seemingly eternal shelf life. This is one of the reasons, perhaps, that grocery-store shelves were stripped bare of flour and beans during spring 2020. These foods have sustained humankind for millennia.

For Abra Berens, chef, writer and former farmer, it took seeing grain and legume production firsthand to fully appreciate them. At Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Mich., she hosts meals featuring crops grown on the organic vegetable and grain farm.

The scale of growing grains and legumes is larger — with bigger equipment — than what she was used to from her career in biodiverse vegetable farming.

Berens’ “aha” moment came when she started cooking black beans grown by Granor as well as her cousin, farmer Matt Berens. She was immediately struck by how different they were from any other bean she’d ever cooked with.

“They’re super creamy. The cooking liquid is inky, inky, black. And they just were a horse of a different colour in a lot of ways,” says Berens.

“And so that got me excited about it. Where it was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ Even these ingredients that I think of as pantry staples, and so not as variable as something like vegetables, are still agricultural products and still have a life cycle and a freshness cycle and all of those things.”

Grains, beans, seeds and legumes are on full display in Berens’ second cookbook, Grist (Chronicle Books, 2021). The collection of more than 140 recipes and 160 variations was an intuitive follow-up to her vegetable-focused first book, Ruffage (Chronicle Books, 2019).

“After vegetables, I was like, ‘I wonder what the next class of ingredients is that people have access to, but maybe don’t feel empowered to take that leap to riffing?’” Berens recalls. “And grains and legumes seemed like a really natural next step, because they’re so ubiquitous.”

The strength of Berens’ approach lies in how effortlessly she communicates the endless options of a meal. She has been cooking professionally since 2006 and extends her chef’s insight to the home kitchen.

By focusing on ingredients, she’s able to dig deep: sharing farmer profiles, exploring various cooking methods (and for beans, answering the “to soak or not to soak” question), and sharing ways to boost flavour with an opening chapter full of phenomenal condiments.

Berens encourages readers to approach cooking “less from a recipe-driven standpoint”; instead, understanding the ingredients they have on hand so they can adapt recipes and make them their own.

“One of the things for me about these books is also trying to convey some of what I’ve learned in restaurant kitchens over the years, to a home cook,” says Berens. “Because it’s endlessly practical, but it’s a different monster than cooking dinner.”

This plays out in myriad ways in Grist, but perhaps most of all in her approach to batch cooking. Grains and legumes lend themselves nicely to big batches. But on the flip side, the cook then often contends with the boredom that sets in as the week wears on.

Instead of settling into repetition, Berens’ style highlights the flexibility in a big pot of boiled beans, lentils or barley. She shows how to stretch each into five days’ worth of different meals.

The idea of presenting batch cooking less as a finished dish and more as ingredient prep stemmed from a conversation she had with her sister, who was tired of eating the same lentil soup day after day.

“We wouldn’t do that in a restaurant,” says Berens. Chefs don’t cook risotto from start to finish for every order, for example. Instead, they cook it 80 per cent of the way and finish each dish immediately before serving it.

“If (my sister) had just cooked lentils, then there’s all of these different ways to use it,” she adds. “But once you bring it all the way to the finished product, you don’t have a ton of options.”

As with Ruffage, Berens wrote Grist with someone shopping in a small-town grocery store in mind. She sees people’s discovery of different varieties of legumes as “an iterative process.”

They’ll likely start with whatever beans they can find at the supermarket. “But then, as they get more comfortable with them, might consider ordering things from small producers around the country and having them shipped, and really diving in and appreciating the nuance for it,” says Berens. “I think that that process is a very good one.”

With flour, the difference between the two is less clear-cut. The shelf-stable products in supermarkets behave differently than freshly stone-milled flours. It takes experience to learn how to respond to the flour you’re using.

“It was really hard to test those recipes,” adds Berens. “And so, I ended up testing them with what was available in my grocery store, as opposed to heritage (flours).”

Heritage grains and beans are more readily available today than they were even five years ago. An increased interest during the pandemic pushed many small producers to launch online stores or upgrade existing platforms.

Berens includes a list of American producers and distributors in Grist, some of which ship north of the border. But the grain movement in Canada is strong; there’s a growing number of options for sourcing locally grown heritage grains and legumes.

Anita’s Organic Mill in Chilliwack, B.C., for example, is stocked by Sobeys, Metro, the Real Canadian Superstore and other major retailers.

Vancouver’s Flourist ships flour, legumes and whole grains nationally. Retailers such as Fieldstone Granary in Armstrong B.C., True Grain on Vancouver Island, Nunweiler’s Flour Company in Hague, Sask., and 1847 Stone Milling in Fergus, Ont. also ship a variety of grain products across Canada.

“It certainly feels very akin to the craft coffee movement of the ’90s, or even craft beer, craft cider,” says Berens. “(It’s) this reevaluation of what was traditionally a commodity crop, and then looking at what it means to go back to an artisan production for it.”

As ingredients, she appreciates the diversity of grains, beans, seeds and legumes most of all. In Grist, readers travel along with Berens as she researches, learns and shares her excitement.

Since writing the book, her household has changed. Berens went from “never (taking) much notice of different grains or legumes” to having jars of buckwheat, bulgur, farro and fonio on her shelf.

“Because they’re there, I use them more, and then I miss them when they’re not there,” she says.

Still cooking her way through the many pounds of grains and legumes she bought for Grist photoshoots, Berens has found that having these ingredients in her cupboard gives her more options.

The other day, for instance, she was making meatballs and didn’t realize she was out of pasta. After considering making pasta from scratch, mashed potatoes or Grist’s farrisotto (pearled farro, “risotto-ed”), she landed on meatballs over polenta.

“Those are a ton of options for flexibility that I might not have utilized before,” says Berens. “And so, I hope that that’s what comes through for people, too. That’s how it’s worked for me.”

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