Hi Camden,

Thanks for your note. It was wonderful to read. I’m so glad you’ve got some interesting grains coming. Let me know how you get on with them.

Do you know about my podcast? My co-host lives in Washington State! You can find it under Ancestral Kitchen Podcast in any podcast app, if you’re interested. We have quite a few recipes on baking and ancient grains.

Hi Christine,

You still have cassette tapes? Wow I’m impressed! 70 lbs. of beef fat is a lot. What a great use for it, though. It makes fabulous soap.

Thanks very much for your note. I loved reading it,
Alison

Thanks for sharing this. I remember seeing a recipe for millet cooked with pumpkin in Dara Goldstein’s Beyond the North Wind book (which I love). I’ve yet to try it. The bread looks interesting. It’s mostly oats, I see. I might give it a go. Thank you!

Hi Rachel,

I love that you’ve ordered some naked oats from Hodmedods. They’re such a wonderful supplier. Yes you can use your Mockmill to mill them. Just this morning I made porridge with Hodmedods naked oats that I ground on setting 20 in my Mockmill 100.

Grinding them in a stone mill results in a varied texture – some very fine particles and some very chunky particles. If you want to create something that’s uniform (i.e. more aligned with oatmeal that you might buy from a UK supplier), you need to use sieves. I have written about this in this post: https://ancestralkitchen.com/2025/05/03/how-to-make-stone-ground-oats-oatmeal-in-the-mockmill/

In addition to using the Mockmill, you could also buy a flaker. I have a Marcato Marga mill, which is hand-cranked and easily produces flaked oats for me. Otherwise you can cook them whole as you would rice. I hope this helps – enjoy!

The message that you got back from the supplier confirms that these are naked oats. All other oats have to be steam-treated to stop the process of rancidity that is kicked off when the incredibly hard hulls are taken off.

I have also found that sometimes naked oats are not as well hulled as they should be. The hull is paper-thin and therefore easy to remove but I think doing this in large quantities with machines is a fallible process. Hence why you are dealing with some of these paper hulls still left on.

The response that you got from your supplier (which I saw in my email) does not answer your question. Yes they’ve told you that they need to be frozen because they haven’t been stabilised but they haven’t addressed the fact that they’re not taking the hulls off properly.

Hi Jam,

Sometimes there’s so much more information in the comments on blog posts than there is in the actual blog posts!

You could substitute rolled oats with oat bran though I’ve never done it. The consistency of the final porridge would be quite different.

The other thing to be aware of is that most of the anti-nutrients in grains are in the bran. Therefore you’re potentially looking at a much higher concentration of phytic acid in your bran than you would be in the whole oat. Because of this my neutralising process will potentially not be as effective as it would be for whole oats.

Alison