Wheat Berry Pancakes

I’ll admit that I bought the little bag of wheat berries last week mostly because I can’t resist unusual foods at a farmers market. When I thought about how to use them, I had hazy intentions of making something savory, like a pilaf. Then in the Craft: blog I saw a recipe this week for wheat berry pancakes and I was intrigued.

Euell Gibbons, in Stalking the Wild Asparagus gives a recipe for cattail pancakes, from the plant he calls “the Supermarket of the Swamp.” When I read it, I was struck by the elegance of the recipe; the cattail flour can only be extracted using water, so embrace the liquid nature of what you get and make pancakes out of it, rather than trying to dry the mess to get flour. As an aside, if all you know about Euell Gibbons is that old Grape-Nuts commercial, you owe it to yourself to hunt out his old books and read them.

Anyway, something about the wheat berry pancake recipe struck a Gibbonsy chord with me. I’ve tried before to grind spelt berries dry in my blender and food processor, with little to no success. Blending the wheat berries with milk seemed like a much better idea. I went one step further and soaked the wheat berries in the milk overnight.

This morning, I blended them for the requisite 4 minutes.

and added the eggs, baking powder and salt. It came out the teensiest bit thin for how I like my batter, so I added a bit more (Pie Ranch Sonora wheat) flour to thicken it up. I cooked them up on a griddle

and they turned out very nice.