With its mild flavor and pleasantly chewy texture, barley deserves more use in everyday fare. Here’s a basic guide to barley, a versatile and useful grain, with ways to use it and links to recipes.

Inexpensive and widely available, barley deserves to be kept on the culinary radar. Ahead you’ll find a bit about its background, varieties, how to cook it, and ways to use it.

Barley can be just as versatile as rice and combines well with bold seasonings. With good amounts of a natural sugar called maltose, it’s the source of barley malt syrup, a thick, not-overly-sweet liquid sweetener. Here are more resources for learning more about barley:

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Amaranth, once a revered crop of the ancient Aztecs, is now a staple in the realm of natural foods in North America and beyond. This quick guide to amaranth grain and flour features an overview of their characteristics and uses.

A hardy crop that’s resistant to drought and cold, amaranth is native to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia. Often referred to as grain amaranth to distinguish it from vegetable amaranth (a closely related plant) it’s a tiny round seed, about half the size of a millet seed. Since amaranth is botanically a seed, it’s technically what’s called a pseudo-grain.

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