Photo: Con Poulos

All my life, I've been partial to whole grains. When I was growing up, my mother baked whole wheat bread from scratch and my father made oatmeal for breakfast every morning. When I left home and began to cook for myself, I substituted whole grain flours for white with great enthusiasm, though not always with the best results. "Taste this banana muffin I just baked," I'd say. "Can you believe it's made with spelt?" (Actually, yes.) I've used whole wheat flour in gingerbread cookies (which worked) and in piecrusts (which didn't). "Oh, for heaven's sake, eat it," I said recently to my 5-year-old, who was warily eyeing a blueberry-bran breakfast bar I'd put in front of him. "Just chew a little more if you have to."  


Of course, whole grains are good for you: They contain fiber, vitamins B and E, and minerals such as iron, potassium and magnesium. Eating them helps prevent heart disease. We all know we should incorporate more of them into our diet, and now even supermarkets that once offered only white flour and maybe whole wheat carry barley, rye and other grains.

But how do you actually bake with these flours? To start with, don't try to disguise them, says pastry chef Kim Boyce, who this fall is opening a retail store, Bakeshop, in Portland, Oregon, and developed the recipes here for O. Boyce started playing with a variety of flours when she took a break from restaurant kitchens and wrote her first cookbook, Good to the Grain, a whole grains baking bible that won a coveted James Beard Foundation Award this year. "I just started fooling around—you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that and see what happens," she says. "And it was frustrating. The textures I was used to were no longer there. I asked myself, 'What am I going for here, health or flavor?'" 

Ultimately she decided on flavor, which meant focusing on the taste of the grains themselves and combining them with ingredients that bring out their full character. Barley, for example, is naturally sweet; it's terrific in pancakes, which Boyce serves with a poached-blueberry syrup. Rye, a nutty grain, is mild enough to allow the coconut to come through in her Coconut Muffins. Boyce usually includes some white flour for texture but ensures that about half the flour in every recipe here is whole grain. If you want to substitute whole grain flours for white in a favorite recipe, keep on hand a multigrain mix that's equal parts barley, rye, whole wheat and white flours, like the one in Boyce's recipes for Sweet and Salty Cookies and Maple Scones. Half a cup of the mix is usually okay as a straight substitute for white flour, she says, and you can experiment with more.

"I want these every morning for breakfast," said my son the other day, his mouth full of warm, chewy ricotta bars I'd made from one of Boyce's recipes. 

So do I. And I'm guessing that you will too.

9 delicious ways to bake with whole grains

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