Where to Eat Whole Grains

Food & Wine Best New Chef 2016 Kevin Fink learned his way around durum wheat in Florence at Trattoria 13 Gobbi; staging at NOMA didn’t hurt his grains education, either. He mills heirloom flours on his Komo Mill for pastas—emmer farfalle, Blue Beard durum cacio e pepe. He grinds ancient Mexican corn varieties from the artisan supplier Masienda for polenta, arepas, and fritters. He puffs wheat berries to punctuate a tartar, and ferments and pressure cooks emmer and Red Fife for a grain salad. He’s also working with Austin’s Richardson Farms to grow the namesake grains. But perhaps the most exciting thing about this place is an approach to the grain we might call “bran to endosperm,” wherein the chef uses parts of the grain in fascinating ways: Bran innoculates mushroom starts and stands in for semolina as a dusting on sourdough and English muffins; Sonoran white wheatberries get fermented for a delicate, golden vinegar.

Both here and at his Boulder restaurant, Oak at Fourteenth, chef Steve Redzikowski cooks with plenty of whole grains to satisfy “super-healthy” locals. Grains provide the earthy foundation for Redzikowski’s multi-textured compositions. A chewy farro salad has lemony braised artichokes, sweet delicata squash, pine nuts, a vibrant mint pesto, creamy burrata and wood-fired chicken. Thin-sliced grilled beef tops a quinoa salad with baby carrots, Brussels sprouts, butternut squash, avocado and Manchego cheese, and pistachios. Even homemade meatballs get the Anson Mills’ grits treatment. denveracorn.com

Marco Canora, the man who wrote A Good Food Day, a cookbook lauding whole grains as part of a healthful diet, has jumped on a trend that’s been spreading among Italian restaurants like DC’s Etto, Chicago’s Nellcôte, and Philadelphia’s Vetri; he’s all a-buzz about the Meadows stone-burr grain mill he installed in the kitchen of his New York City restaurant. He’s using it to mill his own pasta flour and to grind polenta to go with braised rabbit. And Canora is a convert to the glories of amaranth. On the menu, he might pair the caviar-like grain with a ricotta sformato and charred leeks. His attention to this category of food is so, um, granular that the menu details the particular grains in the diets of the animals he sources. The Creekstone Farms beef, for instance, is grass-fed and finished, not with the typical corn, but with barley. restauranthearth.com

Dan Barber of the Blue Hill restaurants in Manhattan and at the upstate farm, Stone Barns, is the chef who devised the dish that is, perhaps, the posterchild for the whole grains movement: rotation risotto. Highlighting the crop roation that organic farmers use to replenish the nutrients in their soils, this dish features a changing cast of grainy characters: barley, millet, rye, buckwheat, the rye-wheat hybrid triticale, flax and sesame seeds, and more. You never know what you’re going to be served at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, but it very well could include rye grown right there at the farm, or coming up, a wheat variety named after Barber himself. bluehillfarm.com

At his original Bondir Cambridge and offshoot Bondir Concord, chef Jason Bond serves up ancient grains from Ethiopian teff to South American kañiwa, a close relation to quinoa, some of which he grows himself in Bondir Gardens, the restaurant’s two-acre organic plot in Carlisle, Massachusetts. If that all sounds esoteric, the resulting dishes on the ever-changing menus at this lauded New American duo are comfortingly familiar. Dinner might start with a wood-fired whole wheat boule, a Turkey red wheat sourdough, or a rye flour ciabatta—with a pumpkin soup abetted by a seeded rye crisp. A spiced beet salad might gain satisfying texture from fried spelt berries, an ingenious teff polenta might accompany a seasonal veggie-driven risotto, and the burger will come in two varieties: your typical beef or whole-grain, the latter giving the former a seriously hearty run for its money. bondircambridge.com

Tony Gemignani, the P.T. Barnum of pizza, knows his audience. At Slice House in the hip SoMa nabe, the multi-world-champion pizzaiolo uses khorasan (aka kamut) pasta and an artisan pie dough that blends the standard 00 flour with spelt, semolina, sprouted grain and whole wheat flours. Not surprisingly, Slice House also offers gluten-free pies, with a rice, potato, and tapioca flour dough. slicehouse2ndst.com

“Chefs should know that you can achieve extraordinary results by experimenting with different varieties of wheat,” says Philadelphia’s Marc Vetri. Listen to him long enough—or read his latest book, Mastering Pasta—and you end up with basically no excuse for not milling your own, whether you’re in a restaurant kitchen or cooking at home. Heck, at Vetri Cucina, his upstairs cooking school, he’ll even teach you how to do it. It’s all in the service of greater deliciousness. “Freshly milled wheat not only has different protein levels which can manipulate texture,” says the chef, “but it also has different flavor components that can be subtle when choosing the accompanying sauce for the dish.” In other words, creativity in Vetri’s pasta-driven kitchen starts with the whole grain and then “experimenting with what works best for the scenario.” Vetri uses a Meadows Mill to grind the perfect blend of wheats for all his pastas: malted wheat malloreddus (a ribbed Sardinian gnocchi-like nugget) with cotechino sausage, creste di gallo (rooster-crest-shaped pasta) with pheasant ragù, chestnut maltagliati (torn sheets meaning “poorly-cut”) with boar ragù—you name it. vetriristorante.com

Perhaps the queen of grain bowls is Jessica Koslow, chef-owner of LA’s instant legend, Sqirl. Koslow’s grain of choice is brown rice, specifically Koda Farms’ trademarked, certified-organic, heirloom Kokuho Rose brown rice. It’s the sweet, earthy flowery base for a tang-o-matic creation dressed in sorrel-packed pesto, lacto-fermented hot sauce, and preserved Meyer lemon, and topped with radishes, feta, and poached egg. If you haven’t been to Silver Lake yet and eaten this thing for breakfast or lunch, you’d better get on it. And don’t forget to add avocado. Beyond this OG of grain bowls? Buckwheat is another Koslow fave. You’ll find it fresh-ground for pancakes and noodles, toasted for texture to garnish dishes, and buddying up with oats and flax, sesame, and sunflower seeds in Sqirl’s chock-a-block granola. sqirlla.com

Grain bowls are so in that even superstar chef José Andrés is getting in the game. The guy behind umpteen excellent projects, from LA’s gastromolecular The Bazaar to the food truck Pepe, serving Spanish sandwiches to suburban Virginians has a new endeavor in this veg-driven mini-chain for starving students with locations in DC’s Dupont Circle, at GWU, and, soon, in West Philly at Penn. Make-your-own bowls can start with white rice, but that’s no good for you; for that whole-grain goodness, go for quinoa or bulgur. Among the house favorites, money’s on the heavenly Eden bowl: quinoa buried under a verdant storm of snowpeas, edamame, green beans, asparagus, broccoli, cilantro, romaine, cuke salad, and sprouts. Brain food for mid-terms, for sure. beefsteakveggies.com

Chicago’s baking couple, Dave and Meghan Miller, launched bake house and milling operation in Chicago. Along with stone-grinding locally-sourced grains for area restaurants and for retail, they mill (and then long-ferment) all their own flours for the pastries, cookies, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, breads and pie crusts here and at Hot Bar in Ravenswood Manor. The house-ground grits feature seasonal toppings, like winter’s saucy meatballs, kale, goat cheese, pesto, and, of course, poached egg. The oats are house-rolled for the oatmeal-rye blend with jam and cultured cream. Wheat berries might be front a grain bowl or fortify the fillings in the pot pies. They’re tireless experimenters, too, so if you’re in Chicago, stop in often to see what’s new. bakermillerchicago.com

“I’m a really big fan of whole grains,” says Karen Hatfield, half of the husband-and-wife team behind Los Angeles’ wildly popular bakery and cafe. “I think it’s kind of one of the few untapped areas that chefs can still explore. They offer so much diversity, they add interesting texture to things, and they have the wholesome quality that I’m always looking for.” Super-satisfying bowls include a quinoa, barley, and stone-ground oats porridge sweetened with Medjool dates and dusted in cinammon; and one of LA’s favorite breakfasts, the Jerusalem bowl, a monster mash-up of wheat berries, barley, and lentils with fried eggs, za’tar-spiced chicken, and chiles. And the blintzes are blini-style, i.e. made with buckwheat. thesycamorekitchen.com

Daniel Humm called it. Back in 2005, F&W asked him what ingredient folks would be talking about in five years, and he said “heirloom grains.” It may have taken us a bit longer to really ramp up the grain-centric chatter, but anyone who’s ever eaten the rolled oats–and–sour cherry granola Chef Humm has long gifted diners at Eleven Madison Park knows how ahead of this curve he has been. It makes sense for a chef from Switzerland, home of müesli, who runs marathons: Grains provide fantastic energy and nutrition. But they’re also just fun to work with, says Humm. “They offer up a lot of possibilities, whether it’s textural, flavor-wise, or visually.” You’ll find them snuck in all sorts of dishes at both Eleven Madison Park and The NoMad, where they might pair with spring greens or other vegetables for a vegetarian entree, or garnish a fish dish as a crumble. And look for grains to star on the menu at the team’s upcoming casual eatery, Made Nice. Says Humm, “We’re playing around with a quinoa tabbouleh, using grains as a risotto, and with bulgur for a salad with eggplant at the moment.” thenomadhotel.com

Chef-owner Ana Sortun has used grains from the start at her 15-year-old flagship. “They give body and texture to a lot of vegetable cooking. They are used to absorb the flavors of spices and vegetables in pilafs and salads,” says this chef who fell in love with Turkish cuisine two decades ago. “They’re a very traditional ingredient in Mediterranean cooking.” Here and at Sortun’s bakery and cafe, Sofra, the raw ingredients include barley both whole and hulled (which Sortun calls yarma); bulgur; quinoa; and roasted green wheat, or freekeh. Oleana’s lamb chops are served with a sweet potato and a green wheat salad, and duck leg gets paired with an almond bulgur pilaf. At Sofra, you’ll find sorts of grain salads: freekeh tossed with butternut squash, pomegranate, and hazelnuts in a salad; barley with chickpeas, dried cherries, and root vegetables. Plus, that Mediterranean meatballs kofte made with good, old New England haddock and bulgur. For dessert? Grano—polished durum—in a Greek yogurt parfait. oleanarestaurant.com

Contrary to popular belief, the restaurant’s name, meaning “lighthouse” in Italian, is not a misspelling of the wheat variety called farro. But the misperception is okay for a chef whose motto is “earth, wheat, fire.” At this favorite in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, chef Kevin Adey says he’s “milling basically all day long,” turning out fresh spelt flour for bread, rye for spaccatelli with braised short ribs and caramelized onions, and durum for a host of other pastas, using his Komo grinder. Whole grains show up on the menu, too: rye is both stewed and puffed to go with roasted monkfish in a black garlic jus; and the signature dish, a local grain porridge, gets a rotating roster of whole kernels—for winter, it’s wheat, spelt, freekah, corn, oats, and emmer, all of which is grown in upstate New York. Why keep that mill motor running 24/7? Adey responds to the question with an example. “We mill our own polenta. It takes less than three minutes to go from whole corn to actually cooking in the chicken stock, and it is unbelievably good,” he says. “It feels fuller on your palate, there are subtle flavor levels you’re tasting. You lose some of the complexity the more time lapses from it being ground.” farobk.com

There’s plenty of meat at this popular farm-to-table spot in Evanston, on the outskirts of Chicago, but chef Nicole Pederson focuses on local vegetables and grains for her “flexitarian” menu. “We serve many decadent things, but healthfulness is always in the back of our minds,” says chef Nicole Pederson. “Dead flour is making us sick, so serving whole grains and flour that’s been treated and grown the right way is really important to us.” Pederson gets her grains from area farmers and the flour for her whole wheat flatbread and other breads come from Wisconsin’s Lonesome Stone Milling and Chicago’s own Baker Miller. Red winter wheat berries from Hazzard Free Farms go into warm ricotta salad with tomato confit and a rasam vinaigrette. Oats from Three Sisters Farm get toasted in butter and cooked in pork stock to gird a crispy pork belly with apple mostarda. Cracked farro mingles with roasted apples, sauerkraut, and sweet potato purée for a satisfying side with pork chops. The most unusual grain that might show up on the menu? Brown rice—grown in Missouri. It makes a swell rice pudding.