Did you know quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) is considered a superfood? Quinoa is gluten-free, high in fiber, and packed with protein and antioxidants. Ryan King, Dining Director at The Arbor Company, gives us a quick cooking demo and shares simple ways to enjoy this versatile ingredient!
Hey, everyone. Ryan King here with the Arbor Company. We're here to discuss some superfoods. And we're going to start today with quinoa, which is one of the superfoods that's considered an ancient grain. And we have some right here. This is rinsed. The reason you want to rinse it is because nothing that's unhealthy or anything like that, but it has some bitter chemicals, so rinsing it helps remove that flavor profile from the end result.
Nobody wants to, you know, have a breakfast cereal that's got some bitterness to it. So giving it a quick rinse for two or 3 minutes really helps get rid of all the all that bitter flavor. And the reason we're here today talking about quinoa is because of the many health benefits that it actually provides. So it's packed full of nutrients.
It has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. It is naturally gluten free so anybody that has celiac disease, or has gluten sensitivities, it's wonderful for them as an additional option, especially, you know, today we're talking about it in a breakfast capacity, but it's also you can incorporate it into salads, into a starch for your dinner meal in place of a rice or potato.
It's also extremely high in fiber. It actually has the highest fiber content of any grain. And so after that, learning a little bit about, you know, the health benefits of it, we'll dig into this little quick cooking demonstration here. So what I have going on today is in this pot right here, I just have some some milk that is simmering.
So we're going to treat this in the same sense that you would almost treat oatmeal, cream of wheat, anything along those lines. So to put it in perspective, it cooks in a very similar manner to rice. So it's a 2 to 1 liquid to dry ingredient recipe. So right here in this thing here we have two cups of quinoa and then this pot right here we have four cups of milk to boost the flavor profile and everything like that, because milk on its own is kind of bland.
We have a tablespoon here of vanilla extract, so we're going to put that bad boy right into the pot here. And then I've got two cinnamon sticks that I just broke in half and we'll put them in here. So we're doing what we're looking to do here. It's just bring this up to a light boil. Give it a little stir here.
Help encourage the movement around will help encourage the the milk to come up to the temperature that it needs to You don't want to go to too too too hard on the boil aspect when it comes to milk because it has a tendency to boil up and boil over. So we're keeping in this kind of a medium heat.
So, it kind of gradually goes up and we don't have to worry about it boiling over. So as you see in here, we're starting to get some some reaction. We're starting to get the bubbles on the top. So we're getting close to where we would be. Under normal circumstances you can either pull out the cinnamon sticks or cook them and pull them out at a later date just for our demonstration purposes here
I already have a nice batch already made up over here. We're going to leave the cinnamon sticks in and add our quinoa in here. So I'm just going to take this, get it all out of the bowl here. All right, great. Set this off to the side here and then you're just want to give it a stir here. Give it a nice, nice little stir.
Keep it so it doesn't clump up, doesn't stick to the bottom. And we're just going to wait right now until this comes back up to comes up to a boil. Once it comes back up, we're going to pop the lid on and then we're going to cut the temperature down. We want to have it in a nice, nice simmer and pretty much very similar to the way you would cook rice, cooking temperature, cooking time, all that kind of stuff.
So as we see here, we're coming up to coming up to a boil again here. So I'll give it another quick stir. Knock this out. Come over here real fast. Grab this lid. Grab the lid, pop the lid back on here. And now I'm just going to dial this back down so that it's going to come as a simmer and it'll cook.
So the cooking time is you want to let it cook for 15 minutes, cut off the cut off the heat, you can remove it from the heat, turn it off, whichever you're comfortable with, and you're going to want to let it sit for another 5 minutes. That'll help, you know, take the last of the liquid and absorb the last of the liquid without cooking it too far, where it becomes very, very mushy.
Move over here. This one here I cooked before we did this little demonstration right here. As you can see, you still have it cooked down, but you have a little bit of liquid there, very similar to how it would come out with oatmeal cream of wheat. The longer it sets, the model absorb. So you can always add back in some more milk.
It depends. Everybody has a slight, slight different preference when it comes to whether they like their oatmeal kind of more tight or if they like it a little bit looser. So you can always add some hot milk or anything like that to thin it out, if that's your preference. So we're going to go over here, grab this, do a couple of things.
And this is completely customizable too. So right now we're doing it a little bit seasonally. So I have some roasted apples here that I roasted with a little bit of cinnamon, brown sugar. We got some granola topping homemade that we did here. These are some raisins that I've reconstituted and a little bit of simmering water so that they are no longer as dry.
They retained a little bit more of the moisture content, got some chopped pecans and for sweetener, because we're kind of talking about the health benefits instead of using sugar and stuff like that, this is a little bit of maple syrup here. So to build it out, you can give it a quick little stir here. You can see, you know, it's got the milk and everything like that still in it.
All right, I'll set this up right here. Grab a little bit of this maple syrup, drizzle it around the top here for you. A little sweetness. Obviously, this is also customizable. Some people have a sweet tooth, some people don't. You can omit it if you don't want it, add it, add more - however you like. And you know there's no rhyme or reason when it comes to what what sweetener you use.
Some people like agave. Some people also want to use brown sugar. Completely customizable how you how you personally like it. Take some of these these apples here. A spoonful of these. Right on the top here. Perfect. This down here take some of these raisins. Sprinkle them around the outside. Mm hmm. So some chopped pecans are another great source of protein.
There are another nuts there. Another superfoods of you. You know, if you don't have an allergy, or whatever, feel free to incorporate the incorporate these in your diet as well. And lastly, a little bit of this here granola that we made in-house this morning. Sprinkle it over the top. I like I personally I really like texture contrast. So that's why I wanted to incorporate these nuts and the granola into the into the recipe. And here we go is our nice final plate here for a nice healthy breakfast option while incorporating some superfoods. So thank you guys for taking a few minutes with me today and learning a little bit about some superfoods and maybe, you know, broadening your horizons when it comes to what you can and can't eat for breakfast. Thanks again and look forward to seeing you next time.