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Oats:
The High-protein Cereal Grain
The Scots did not think Samuel Johnson
was so cute when he defined oats in his dictionary as "a
grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland
supports the people." Snide remark Johnson may have intended,
but he was actually paying the Scots a high compliment. They had
not only discovered a food very high in nutrition and very low
in cost of production, but one that grew well in their climate.
Of all the cereal grains, oats ranks highest in protein and runs neck and neck with wheat as the all-around most nutritive cereal grain. The 1950 USDA handbook on grains rates oats at 14.5 percent protein, while whole wheat runs second with 13.4 percent. These figures are somewhat outdated now, especially in regard to oats. The average of 287 varieties selected from the World Oat Collection recently averaged 17 percent in protein content. More significantly, two new varieties, DAL from Wisconsin and OTEE from Illinois, contain over two percent more protein than that average, and can go as high as 22 percent on a dry basis. That could make oats almost competitive with soybeans in protein (soybeans contain about 35 percent protein but yield less per acre than oats) and most plant scientists express belief in a bright future for oats as human food.
Part of their reasoning is based on the character as well as the quality of oat protein. It has a bland taste, is soluble under acidic conditions, is stable in emulsions with water and fat, and holds moisture, thus making it an ideal protein to supplement other foods. At the USDA laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, researchers are using oat protein to make nutritious refreshment beverages, meat extenders, and high-protein baked goods.
Oats also outscore other cereal grains in thiamine, calcium, iron, and some say, phosphorus, though the USDA tables from 1950, below, give whole wheat a slight edge in that department.
Thiamine
oatmeal .82
whole wheat flour .55
wild rice .45
yellow cornmeal .38
brown rice .32
rye flour .15
barley .12
buckwheat .08
unenriched white flour .06
Iron
oatmeal 4.1
whole wheat flour 3.3
yellow cornmeal 2.4
brown rice 2.0
barley 2.0
rye flour 1.1
buckwheat 1.0
unenriched white flour .8
white rice .08
wild rice 0.
Riboflavin
wild rice .63
oatmeal .19
whole wheat flour .12
yellow cornmeal .11
barley .08
rye flour .07
brown rice .05
unenriched white flour .05
buckwheat .04
white rice .03
Phosphorus
whole wheat flour 3.72
oatmeal 3.50
wild rice 3.39
brown rice 3.03
yellow cornmeal 2.56
barley 1.89
rye flour 1.85
white rice 1.36
buckwheat .88
unenriched white flour .87
Calcium
oatmeal 1.60
whole wheat flour .41
brown rice .39
white rice .24
rye flour .22
wild rice .19
barley .16
unenriched white flour .16
buckwheat .11
yellow cornmeal .10
Calories per 100 grams
oatmeal 396
wild rice 364
white enriched flour 364
white rice 362
brown rice 360
rye flour 356
yellow cornmeal 355
barley 349
buckwheat 348
whole wheat 338
Niacin
wild rice 6.2
brown rice 4.6
whole wheat flour 4.3
barley flour 3.1
yellow cornmeal 2.0
oatmeal 1.9
white rice 1.6
unenriched white flour .9
rye flour .6
buckwheat .4
Fat
oatmeal 7.0
yellow cornmeal 3.9
whole wheat flour 2.0
brown rice 1.7
buckwheat flour 1.2
barley 1.0
rye flour 1.0
unenriched white flour 1.0
wild rice .7
white rice .3
Carbohydrates
buckwheat 79.5
white rice 79.4
barley 78.8
rye flour 77.9
brown rice 77.7
unenriched white
flour 76.1
wild rice 75.3
yellow cornmeal 73.7
whole wheat flour 71.0
oatmeal 70.2
If you keep horses, sheep, or rabbits, it will pay you to grow oats. Even a small patch in the garden will save money on your rabbit feed bill. You don't even have to thresh the grain out, just feed it stalks and all to these animals or other kinds of livestock.
Oats are good feed when ground or rolled and mixed with ground corn, too. That's the standard dairy cow ration on most U.S. farms. Whole oats are excellent food for poultry too; the hulls help prevent cannibalism. Chickens will eat more oats if they are rolled and mixed with milled corn and wheat. Given a choice between wheat and oats in their whole grain scratch feed, they will invariably eat up all the wheat first. The oat hull that covers the grout so tightly on each grain may be good for them, but I suspect—as in the case with humans—the taste is not.
Oats make excellent hay too.
Cut them when the grain is in the early milky stage, just beginning
to fill out and the plant is entirely green yet. Yields of eight
tons per acre are possible or 600 pounds of plant protein per
acre, not as good as alfalfa but remember that you have to wait
a whole year to harvest alfalfa after you plant it. You wait only
two months for hay from oats.
Common white oats, Avena sativa, are by far the most widely grown oats. They are planted in spring for midsummer harvest. Red oats, Avena byzantina, are the southern and south-central type, sown in the fall where winters are mild for harvest the following summer. Hull-less or naked oats, A. nuda, are a rarely grown third type. In addition, there are the kinds young men are supposed to sow before settling down to responsible adulthood. It's a matter of opinion whether men cause the world more anguish before or after attaining "responsible adulthood" but all agree that real wild oats are nasty weeds.
The distinction between white and red oats is often hazy except for the difference in planting time. White oats are more yellow than white, and red oats are often greyish in color. Many of the common white oat varieties have red oat parentage somewhere in their background. CLINTON, one of the more successful white oat varieties over the years, is actually a cross between white and red. CHEROKEE and ANDREW are red varieties marketed as white, and MISSOURI O-205 and KANOTA are quite similar varieties marketed as red.
Many varieties of both white and red oats are available, but it's not necessary for you to know many of them. That's true of all cereal grains. The life of any one variety is apt to be quite short, limited to the five to 10 years it takes for a disease pathogen to adjust to that variety's inbred resistance. That's why plant breeders have to constantly develop new varieties with new resistances to disease.
Some southern varieties still performing well in research station tests include COKER, FLORIDA 501, GEORGIA 7199, TAM O-301, and TAM O-312. In the North, newer varieties from various midwestern sources include CLINTFORD, OTEE, NOBLE, STOUT, DAL, ORBIT, GARLAND, ASTRO, MARINER, and PENN-FIELD. DAL and OTEE are particularly desirable because of their higher than normal protein content, as I've already mentioned. Older varieties that have the proven reliability you can never be sure of in a new one include CHEROKEE, CLINTON, and BONDA. I mention those three in particular because they enjoy a reputation for good milling quality: producing a high amount of oatmeal per total weight. However, no one particular variety of oats seems more suitable for oatmeal than others. Quaker Oats goes right to the marketplace for its supply, selecting high-quality grain of whatever variety.
Oats require more water than other cereal crops to make a good yield. They like fertile soil too (what doesn't?) but will perform satisfactorily without high additions of fertilizer. In fact, you can get too much nitrogen in the ground for oats, if the soil is naturally rich. If a previous oat crop possessed a dark green color and much of it fell over on the ground before harvest, add no nitrogen at all to the next crop and only 10 pounds of phosphorus per acre. If oats seldom lodge and maintain a healthy green color, add no more than 30 pounds of nitrogen and 10 pounds of phosphorus and potassium per acre. If oats are short and light green in color, ripening to a flat tan rather than a solid yellow, the soil needs about 60 pounds of nitrogen, 15 pounds of phosphorus, and 20 to 30 pounds of potassium.
Such low amounts of fertilizer can be supplied organically at reasonable cost even on large fields. Legumes will fix that much nitrogen in the soil naturally. So a green manure crop with some manure added along with two tons of rock phosphate applied per acre every three years and lime, should result in yields of 60 to 70 bushels per acre. Yields of 90 to 100 bushels per acre are possible on good ground.
Fertilizer balance is the key. Either after applications of organic fertilizer or inorganic chemicals, soil tests may show a field contains 150 pounds of available nitrogen and only 30 pounds of potassium. That could spell trouble for a cereal crop like oats. It would grow big and heavy and fall over so flat on its strawy back as to be virtually unharvestable. If you have 150 pounds of nitrogen available, you ought to have at least 60 pounds of potassium available too, to give the stalks enough strength to match the heavy growth the nitrogen will cause.
Oats have fewer enemies than corn or wheat: no Hessian fly, no chinch bug. Sometimes greenbugs, a type of aphid, will attack oats, but in many years a small wasplike insect, Adhidius testaceipes, keeps them in check. But don't allow volunteer oats, wheat, or barley to grow around your place. They could encourage greenbug buildup.
Of the diseases that attack oats, crown rust is probably the most important, especially in south and central areas. There's no cure, just preventive maintenance. Plant resistant varieties and cut out any buckthorn bushes near fields or gardens. The disease uses buckthorn as a host plant during part of its life cycle.
Septoria leaf blight is another fungal disease that reoccurs in cereal crops including oats. Again crop rotation and resistant varieties are your best defense.
Quality in grain is based on a number of attributes: the grain must be clean of insects, mold, and any other foreign matter. But just as important, it must meet certain weight standards to qualify as good grain, and this is especially true of oats. A bushel of oats is supposed to weigh around 38 pounds but only plump, healthy, well-grown oats will actually weigh that much. Test weights of 36 and 37 pounds per bushel are considered very good; when test weight falls below 30, you are handling poor oats, shriveled grains that contain little food value and low germination potential. (For comparison, wheat is supposed to weigh 60 pounds per bushel.) Weight can also be an indication of moisture. The drier the grain, the more it will weigh, everything else being equal. That may surprise you, but the moisture that swells the grains so that fewer of them fit into a bushel weighs less than the grains themselves. Removing the moisture allows more grains per bushel.
In choosing a variety, the best advice is the usual: find someone in your area growing good oats and ask him what variety he uses.
Whether you plant in fall or spring, oats culture proceeds in similar fashion. Since my experience has been only with spring oats, I'll describe that process. Southern growers can adjust what I say to their own fall planting conditions, or proceed in a manner similar to what I described for planting wheat in the fall.
Planting
For spring oats, the earlier you can plant the better. I have planted oats in Minnesota when there were still snowdrifts melting in the woods. Oats like cool weather and can get along just as well with cloudy weather as with constant sun. That's why they are adapted so well to a place like Scotland. In the North and East in the United States, oats are a good crop to grow wherever potatoes grow well: the two seem to like a similar environment.
There's an old folk saying that advises the farmer to "mud in your oats and dust in your wheat" to get good crops of both, referring to spring oats and fall wheat. The saying is more accurately a description of what usually happens rather than good advice. When you plant oats in the spring, you are battling wet weather, and when you plant wheat in the fall, you are contending with dry weather, whether you like it or not. Be that as it may, whenever the mud dries enough in spring to be workable, plant your oats. The longer you wait, the poorer your subsequent crop is likely to be.
If you have gardened a long time, you have noticed, I'm sure, that almost every year, there is a short period of dry weather in early spring when the ground does dry out enough to till. The temptation, which most of us give in to, is to plant some early vegetables. About half the time this planting amounts to very little because the ground is still too cold for good germination, and more cold weather is going to come anyway. So instead of planting vegetables at that time, plant a patch of oats and you'll be ahead on both counts.
Working the Soil and Seeding
The ground you intend to plant oats on you will probably have plowed or disked or rotary-tilled the preceding fall. Fall-worked ground dries out faster than spring-plowed and so you can get on it earlier. The finer the seedbed the better, but for oats you can be a little less finicky and get away with it. Invariably you are going to get more rain shortly, which will insure at least a fairly good stand of oats even if planted on roughly worked soil.
In the garden, you can do it all with a rotary tiller. Work the ground up, but not too finely, broadcast the seed by hand, scattering it as evenly as you can over the plot, then run over it lightly again with your tiller. The second time over, the grain gets covered with dirt (at least partially, you don't have to cover every single grain) and the soil gets worked a little finer.
On a larger plot or field, you disk, harrow, then plant; either broadcast or with a drill as described in the chapter on wheat. Seeding rate for oats is two-and-one-half bushels per acre. The drill puts the grain in the ground and covers it automatically. Set it to plant the seed not more than two inches deep. Early in spring you can plant even shallower. If you broadcast the seed, cover it by going over the ground with a disk or a harrow. You will get some seed planted deeper than two inches, and some barely covered at all, but don't worry. Sometimes seed will sprout and grow even lying on top of the ground. You won't get as good a stand as with a drill. That's why most broadcasters will plant at a three- -bushel-per-acre rate, a little higher than normal.
Weed Control
Weeds will be a problem in oats unless you follow a good year-round, year-in and year-out program of weed prevention. Once the oats are planted, you can't get into them to cultivate, though on a small patch you can walk through and hoe out some weeds. A good stand of oats will shade out some weeds itself. But if the field you plant in was weedy last year, you can be sure your oats will be weedy too. The weeds won't necessarily "take the crop" and might not even hurt your yield much, but they make harvesting more difficult and increase the problem of getting weed seed and weed chaff out of the grain.
Other than commiserating about the weeds, you have nothing to do in your oats patch until harvest.
You can harvest your oats as grain, as hay, or even as silage, though I don't recommend the silage. It's unnecessary on a homestead. For grain, wait until the crop is dead ripe for harvesting with a grain combine. Or cut it and windrow it when not quite ripe. The stalks then ripen in the windrow and are combined with a special pickup attachment on the combine. In the more northerly states, this latter method is still often used because farmers believe the grain ripens too slowly and unevenly on the stalk. By cutting and windrowing, they can often get the grain harvested with less risk, since if left standing to ripen, the grain may be knocked flat on the ground by a hard storm. (Of course, if it rains too long on the windrowed oats, part of the crop can be lost too. Farming is all gamble.)
A small patch of oats, in my opinion, is best harvested by handling it almost as if it were hay. Cut it before the dead-ripe stage either with a scythe or sickle-bar mower, and let it dry on the ground. Then stack it. Cover with a piece of plastic film or "comb" the surface of the stack with a fork until it is smooth and the surface straws all run longitudinally toward the ground (like a thatched roof) so that rainwater will mostly run off instead of soaking in. Then feed the oats, stalks, grain, and all, to cattle, horses, chickens, rabbits, even pigs.
For Grain
If you are reluctant to mow the grain down to dry on the ground for fear of rain ruining it, you can wait until the standing oats is dead ripe and dry, then mow and stack immediately. Or even less risky (but more laborious), you can cut the oats when the grain is just beginning to harden, and the stalks have still a little green in them, tie the stalks into bundles as described in the chapter on wheat, and place the bundles into shocks where the oats can finish ripening and drying somewhat protected from rain. Then rank the bundles in a barn or even outside like a double stack of wood with the butts of the bundles to the outside and the heads inside to protect them from rain. Feed the oats by the bundle as needed.
You won't find this precise manner of harvesting, storing, and feeding oats advised anywhere else that I know of anymore. It's a method out of the past, which fortunately fits the homesteader of the future. I was pleased to learn that as late as 1963 (and without doubt still true somewhere, USDA officials observed small homestead plots of oats being harvested in the central states with grain cradles and [more often] with old-fashioned binders, the oats then fed by the bundle unthreshed to livestock). I'm not surprised in the least, but am glad I can now point to experience other than my own to substantiate what I know is a very economical and practical way to feed grain to animals, though the method is unquestionably obsolete in modern, commercial agriculture. Not only do the animals "harvest" the grain as they eat it, but they clean up most of the straw too. Any old-timer will tell you that cows and horses like oats straw. They will sometimes eat it for roughage as well as they eat hay. It isn't as good for them as hay, we say, but who's to argue with a cow? At least they consume more total roughage that way, which is all to the good.
Storage
Rodent control is vital if you stack oats over winter in the manner described. Several cats will suffice, if you can train them to be happy living in and around the stack, not in your kitchen. A little trick we have found very helpful in this regard is to pile our stacks of hay, straw, or whatever over small wooden frames which, in effect, form low, cozy rooms inside the stacks. The cats and dogs (and kids) love to sleep and/or play in these small "rooms" and of course, the structures take away the place in the center base of the stack where rodents would normally nest.
For framing these "rooms," we use wooden pallets obtainable at low cost or free from a variety of small factories. We just stand several of them together to make a room perhaps four or five feet square, open on one (east) side, and wire them together. Another pallet or two goes over the frame, being careful to leave the east-facing side open for entrance and exit. Stacks, to be effective, should be at least 12 feet tall, conical, with a base diameter of about 14 feet. Larger stacks work better.
This type of shelter would make an ideal pen for a sow and her newborn pigs or for a fattening pig too, if the porkers were not confined.
Making Hay
Oats make good hay, cut when the grain is in the early milk stage. Where you need hay fast—for the coming winter rather than waiting for a regular legume-hay crop you can't harvest until the year after planting—oats are your answer. Plant in April, make hay in June.
Making hay is not a mysterious nor difficult process. Small amounts can be cut with a scythe or larger amounts with a sickle-bar mower and allowed to lay on the ground to cure in the sun for a day or two. When nearly dry, rake into windrows or pile into very small stacks for further drying, then haul into the barn or pile into a large conical stack outside. We make meadow hay simply by mowing it, waiting two days, then loading it in the pickup truck with pitchforks. Then we haul it to where we want to build a stack of it, and pile it up carefully and solidly so water will run off its conical sides. The outer layer is usually ruined by the weather, but six inches inside, the hay remains nice and green.
For larger amounts of hay, there are umpteen dozen old and new pieces of machinery to use: mower-windrowers; mower-crimpers that cut and crimp or smash the hay stalks so they dry faster; all manner of rakes and tedders to windrow the hay; old-time hay loaders that pick the hay out of the windrow and push up into the hay wagon for the farmer to distribute into the picturesque tall loads of hay; balers that pick the hay out of the windrow and compress it into wire- or twine-tied bales; and now the new kind of balers that roll the windrow up into cylinders of hay that weigh a ton.
If you have more than an acre of hay to make, you need a mower and a rake, both of which can be purchased used quite reasonably. There must be thousands of obsolete side-delivery rakes rusting away on farms today. The even older dump rakes are handy for small hay fields if you can find one. Once hay is raked into windrows or piles, it is just about as easy on less than four acres to load it with a pitchfork as with a hayloader. On more acreage, hire a custom baler.
All of which may not be apropos to this book. On the small amount of oats I envisage a homesteader growing for hay or grain, he can handle the job entirely by hand except perhaps for mowing.
The oats you want for your own use you can thresh and winnow in the same way you would thresh wheat by hand. Thirteen-and-a-half bushels of good oats makes a barrel (180 pounds) of rolled oats, so you would hardly want more than a bushel's worth, assuming you are using other grains too. If you are harvesting your oats with a combine, or more likely are having it combined by a farmer, you can, of course, just take the grain from the combine bin and winnow it clean.
I'm not sure you would want to process your own oats for table use yet. Oats are more difficult to prepare than wheat, as. yet I have found no one who has devised or who makes a dehuller that is really practical for home use. But I'm just as sure that when homesteaders understand the basic process and problem involved, they'll find an answer. Until then, for your own use, you might just as well buy rolled oats. They're certainly one of the best food values for the cost that you can buy in the supermarket.
On the other hand, if you've gone to the trouble of growing high-protein oats on soil of high organic matter content, you are going to be feeding your animals a better grain than you are feeding yourself, which seems kind of stupid. Here's what you have to do to get that hull off the oat groat so you can make your own oatmeal and oat flour.
Commercial oat processors have found that heating the grain for one-and-a-half hours at a temperature of 180°F. makes the hulls brittle and easier to remove. The heating also dries the grain down to around eight percent moisture from storage moisture of about 12 percent, this reduction is necessary for quality oatmeal production. You can certainly roast your own oats in your oven.
The old method of removing the hulls after roasting was to grind them lightly between two large carborundum or emery-stone disks. The disks had to be set very precisely, so that the space between them was just small enough for the stones to tear and scrape loose the hulls of the oats without pulverizing the groats.
Much faster dehullers are used now. The Quaker Oats folks dehull oats in a centrifugal, impact-type huller where a high-speed rotor throws the oats against a rubber liner hard enough to knock the hull loose and blow it away.
The steamed groats are then passed through steel rollers for flaking and dried for old-fashioned oatmeal. Nowadays, when no one has time to enjoy a leisurely breakfast, we have for our convenience "three-minute" oats or something like that. To cut the time of cooking oats, the processors "steel-cut" the oat groats. All that means is that the oats are partially ground. Each groat is cut approximately into three parts.
Your blender will cut up the groats to any size you want but it cuts up the hulls too. All that fiber may be healthful, but not tasteful. You can run the blender just a little and sift out some of the hulls and get finally to something approximating good oat flour.
You can set the threshing cylinder on a grain combine (the concaves, as we always called them) so close that about a third of the groats will be knocked right out of the hulls. If roasted oats were run back through a combine adjusted that way, I believe de-hulling would be nearly complete, but I've never tried such a trick and doubt it would be very practical.
A method that would be practical, I'm assured, (though I haven't had a chance to test the idea yet) is to run the roasted grain through a small roller-type feed mill. Sears sells one for about $250. If you need a roller mill for cracking grain for livestock anyway, that cost might not be out of line even on a homestead.
A couple of other interesting tidbits about oats may be of interest to you. A common practice among strawberry growers (which I believe began in England) used to be to grow oats in the strawberry patch for mulch. Instead of having to buy straw and transport it to the garden, gardeners bought oats and broadcast-sowed them over the entire strawberry patch in the early fall or late summer. The grain would grow tall but not have enough time to produce seed before frost killed it. Dead, the oat plants fell over and maintained a protective mulch over the berry plants. The oat plants would not come to life again in the spring. There's no reason why the practice still wouldn't work.
On a more modern note, the University of Minnesota about six years ago, was experimenting with new ways to grow edible mushrooms. They reported that the mushrooms grew quite well in a "soil" composed almost entirely of oat grains.
Oat hulls, as a by-product of the oatmeal industry, are used to produce furfural, an important industrial solvent. That's a nice detail you can use to impress your friends as you feed them a homemade oat cake.
¾ cup peanut butter
½ cup honey
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
¾ cup nonfat dry milk
1 cup oatmeal
¼ cup toasted sesame seeds *
2 tablespoons boiling water
chopped nuts or toasted sesame seeds for coating balls
Preheat oven to 200° F.
In a medium-sized bowl, combine peanut butter, honey, and vanilla extract; blend thoroughly.
Mix nonfat dry milk and oatmeal together. Gradually add to the peanut butter-honey mixture, blending thoroughly, using hands if necessary to mix as dough begins to stiffen. Blend in the toasted sesame seeds.
Add 2 tablespoons boiling water to mixture, blending well.
Shape in 1-inch balls. Roll in finely chopped nuts or toasted sesame seeds. For variety, roll half the mixture in chopped nuts and the other half in toasted sesame seeds.
* Toast sesame seeds in oven for about 20 minutes or until lightly browned.
1 cup oat flour (oatmeal may be ground in electric blender)
¾cup soy flour
¼ cup sesame seeds
¾teaspoon salt
¼ cup oil
½ cup water
Preheat oven to 350° F.
Stir together flours, seeds, and salt. Add oil and blend well. Add water and mix to pie dough consistency.
Roll dough on greased baking sheet, to 1/8-inch thickness. Cut into squares or triangles and bake in oven until the crackers are crisp and golden brown, about 15 minutes.
3 cups oatmeal
1½ cups coconut, unsweetened
½ cup wheat germ or soy grits, if preferred
1 cup sunflower seeds
¼ cup sesame seeds
½ cup honey
¼ cup oil
½ cup cold water
1 cup slivered, blanched almonds
½ cup raisins (optional)
Preheat oven to 250° F.
In a large mixing bowl, combine oatmeal, coconut, wheat germ or soy grits, sunflower seeds, and sesame seeds. Toss ingredients together thoroughly.
Combine honey and oil. Add to dry ingredients, stirring until well mixed. Add the cold water, a little at a time, mixing until crumbly.
Pour mixture into a large, heavy, shallow baking pan which has been lightly brushed with oil. Spread mixture evenly to edges of pan.
Place pan on middle rack of the oven and bake for 2 hours, stirring every 15 minutes. Add 1 cup slivered almonds and continue to bake for ½ hour longer, or until mixture is thoroughly dry and light brown in color. Cereal should feel crisp to the touch.
Turn oven off and allow cereal to cool in oven. If raisins are to be added to cereal, do so at this point.
Remove cereal from oven, cool and put in a lightly covered container. Store in a cool, dry place.
Serve plain or with fresh fruit.
8 teaspoons dry yeast
1 cup lukewarm water
1 tablespoon honey
¼ cup nonfat dry milk
1 cup water
½ cup oil
1½ teaspoons salt
4 tablespoons honey
2 eggs, well beaten
2 cups oatmeal
6½ cups whole wheat flour
1 cup currants
1 egg, slightly beaten
½ teaspoon water
Dissolve yeast in 1 cup lukewarm water. Add 1 tablespoon honey.
Combine nonfat dry milk and 1 cup water with wire whisk, and heat almost to scalding point. Add oil, salt, and honey. Cool to lukewarm.
In a large mixing bowl, combine milk mixture, 2 well-beaten eggs, and yeast mixture. Mix in oatmeal and 6 cups of the whole wheat flour, 3 cups at a time, reserving ½ cup for the second kneading.
Knead until smooth and elastic, for 5 minutes.
Put into an oiled bowl. Cover with damp cloth and let rise in a warm place until double in bulk, 1½ hours (approximately).
Stir dough down and knead with remaining ½ cup whole wheat flour, gradually working in currants. Shape into 3 round loaves. Brush with beaten egg to which ½ teaspoon water has been added. Put loaves on oiled cookie sheets to rise. Let rise 1 hour in draft-free spot. Meanwhile preheat oven to 375°F.
Bake in oven for 25 minutes until golden brown. Remove from pan and cool before slicing.
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