Pantry to Dinner: The Climate-Friendly Grains You’ve Probably Never Tried

Available on Apple and Spotify.

What if some of the most climate-friendly foods in your pantry are the ones you've never heard of?

In this episode of Pantry to Dinner, Victoria sits down with Bluedot Living contributor Caroline Saunders to explore a few remarkable grains and seeds that deserve more attention. From the ancient grain-like seed amaranth to fiber-packed chia and the innovative perennial grain Kernza, this conversation uncovers how simple pantry staples can support healthier meals, reduce environmental impact, and introduce new flavors into your kitchen.

Along the way, Caroline shares practical ways to cook with these ingredients, why some crops are naturally drought-resistant, and how one emerging grain could help restore soil health across America's farmland.

Whether you're looking to expand your pantry, reduce food waste, or simply discover something new to cook, this episode offers plenty of inspiration.

In this episode:

• Why amaranth is one of the most resilient crops you can buy
• The surprising health benefits of chia seeds
• How to use chia as an egg replacer and breakfast staple
• What makes Kernza different from traditional wheat
• How perennial grains could help rebuild soil and reduce erosion
• Easy ways to incorporate climate-friendly grains into everyday meals
• Why simple pantry cooking is often the most sustainable choice

Read Caroline’s writing: https://bluedotliving.com/author/carolinesaunders/

About Caroline Saunders:

Caroline Saunders is a strategy and operations leader working at the intersection of media, climate, and sustainable food systems. She is the managing director and editor-in-chief of The SUNN Post, a national nonprofit student newspaper amplifying young voices. Previously, she served as chief of staff at Grist, and she has written about sustainable food for outlets like The Guardian, Bluedot Living Kitchen, and SAVEUR. She also holds a pastry diploma from Le Cordon Bleu Paris, bringing a unique perspective to food and sustainability.

Meet the Host:

Victoria Riskin: I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.

Transcript

Victoria Riskin: Welcome to the Bluedot Imagine If podcast. I'm Victoria Riskin, and I'm the founder of Bluedot Living, and I am here today to offer you some ideas for your pantry and some easy ways to cook and save you money, which is very important right now, and care for the planet all at the same time. It's a tall order, but we can do it.

So I created the Imagine If miniseries called Pantry to Dinner, and to guide us, I'm so happy to have with me Caroline Saunders to explore with me simple ingredients and some small shifts on how to have less waste, a healthier kitchen, and a delicious meal. So Caroline is a regular contributor to the Bluedot Living Kitchen newsletter and our magazine, which you can find in the link in the show notes, and I love her writing.

So today, we're gonna take a deep dive, or at least a bit of a dive, into grains. There's so much to say, so welcome back. It's so nice to see you again. It's been a little bit of time.

Caroline Saunders: It has. Can't wait to talk all things grains.

Victoria Riskin: Yeah, so maybe we should start with a grain I have not used a lot, and I wanna know more about, and that's amaranth. Is amaranth a seed or is it a grain? And we get those things confused perhaps because that's the way they look. They look like one or the other. Kind of like, is a tomato a fruit or is it a vegetable? And is amaranth a seed or is it a grain?

Caroline Saunders: It is technically a seed. It falls into that category of pseudo grains that are actually seeds. It's just this really interesting plant where pretty much all parts of it are edible. It's very common to stew and braise the leaves on the plant. And then the seeds that it produces are edible, can be toasted, can be cooked as a whole grain, can be turned into a flour. It is just this really undersung, tasty seed-grain thing. We'll call it a grain for our purposes.

Victoria Riskin: OK, I accept that. Where does it grow? And why is it Earth-friendly — other than it sounds like you can use all parts of it in so many different ways, which makes it sound brilliant to me. What could you tell me about its climate relationship?

Caroline Saunders: Yeah. So it is indigenous to Central and South America. And if you ever see fields of amaranth growing, it's actually really worth googling. It's so striking. It's these tall, beautiful stalks that to me look a bit like a tree plant thing that should exist in The Lorax, just big, like Truffula, fluffy red tops. So it's really visually stunning. And what's interesting is it is really, really drought-resistant and can withstand really sudden shocks. And that — we're gonna stretch my botany understanding here — but that has a lot to do with the fact that it is a C4 plant in how it does photosynthesis. So some listener out there is a botanist and gets this really well. But it is a really amazing climate-adapted crop in that way.

Victoria Riskin: So what are some of the things that you make with amaranth, though?

Caroline Saunders: Honestly, my favorite thing to do with it, there are many things one can do with it. I do know it exists in a flour form, although I haven't used that, and I'd be super interested to hear if any listeners have. I'm always trying to learn more about flours I could use in my baking. But it is really fantastic just cooked as a whole grain. So I use it like a base for adding beans or whatever on top of. And then I also really love it as a breakfast porridge, cooked like a breakfast porridge with a little sweetener added, and there's a great recipe for that on the Bluedot site that I love. And then the way that I became familiar with amaranth, it is a great mix-in in granola when it's just the dried seeds because it adds this fantastic addictive crunch that punches way outside its weight class.

Victoria Riskin: Crunch is my number one passion. I like things that crunch. If things don't crunch, meh, you know, meh.

Caroline Saunders: What's the point?

Victoria Riskin: What's the point? That's interesting, and I love making granola. One of the things I put in my granola, which I think is actually quite good, is chia.

Caroline Saunders: Oh, cool. Yeah. Obsessed with chia.

Victoria Riskin: Yeah. So say a lot about the chia because it's like this tiny thing that's so magical, right?

Caroline Saunders: It is this tiny, tiny thing that is so magical. So chia is another — we're just in this amazing drought-resistant category right now of pseudo grains. Chia is that. It is also super drought-resistant, crazily so, and it is native to parts of Central America. And it's a seed, too, and there are so many ways to use it. I love to make chia seed pudding. It's this two-ingredient or three-ingredient, if you want a sweetener, make-ahead thing. It's a great base for a breakfast that you can then riff on by adding fruits and nut butters and yogurt and all sorts of stuff. And I also use it as a vegan egg replacer sometimes, which we can come back to. That's pretty fun. It kind of works like a flax egg in that way, if any listeners have ever done that. But what's really cool about chia is its health advantages. And it's one of the reasons I love it for breakfast. It has just a ton of fiber and a ton of good fats, and I'm always looking for those things.

Victoria Riskin: So for all those people who go out and buy whatever it is to help them in the morning have a better digestive system, they can put those on the shelf, and they can get chia seeds and bada bing. We're in good shape. So that's why I put them in my granola. I put them in right after I finished cooking. I don't know if that's the best approach. But one of the reasons is that when I heat up and stir and I put in honey, if I put the chia seeds in too soon, they kind of expand, and they get a little bit sticky. So you know what I'm saying? And so maybe that's why they're a good egg substitute because they actually do some other things once they're…

Caroline Saunders: No, and that makes total sense. I was trying to remember if I've ever used them in granola. I definitely love, like, adding seeds at the end, but I don't think I've used chia, so that's good to know about the right time to add them in. Because yeah, to your point, I think the technical term is they goop up real good.

Victoria Riskin: And the question is, do you want goop? So, OK. So back to crunch. You were talking about crunch. Anything you want to say about crunch? Because I'm a crunch-a-holic.

Caroline Saunders: So apparently, the pro-crunch approach is to add the chia seeds at the end to something like granola, and the anti-crunch is to add liquid.

Victoria Riskin: Yeah. Yeah. I think that sums it up. I'm not sure. Did we have any other grains we were gonna talk about? Oh, there is one called Kernza.

Caroline Saunders: Oh.

Victoria Riskin: You come up with these grains that nobody's ever heard of. They're fantastic. Oh my gosh. Tell me all about Kernza. That's your job. Tell me all about Kernza.

Caroline Saunders: Kernza is the coolest thing ever. I'm a huge undying Kernza fan. And Kernza is a grain badass, we can comfortably say, because it, unlike most commercial grains, is a perennial, so it grows again and again for multiple years, which is, again, atypical to how most, frankly, row crop production works in the U.S. And it has all these amazing culinary uses where it's a whole grain, right? And so it's great in that way. You can cook it as a grain salad; obvious health benefits come with whole grains. You can use the flour to turn it into bread. But I really like it for baking specifically because it has this interesting flavor to it that I find to be distinct from other flours. Like, sometimes, you know how you'll talk about flavor notes in a flour and you're like, “Eh, that seems like kind of a stretch.” No, no, no, this is a whole different ballgame. This, genuinely, honest to God, tastes like cinnamon and spices and super sweet. As a person with a pastry background, that is so interesting to me.

It makes me think, OK, what are baked goods that are begging for that flavor profile that you can work it into? Like cinnamony pop-tarts or crumb cakes or things like that. I use it in a Brittany shortbread recipe. And so I'm really excited about the culinary potential there, and it's still produced on a super tiny scale and is processed at a tiny scale. So I think there's genuinely a lot of culinary innovation for this grain that is still to come that I'm excited to see chefs do. 

But coming back to the environmental side, the whole reason that a couple of nonprofits, the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania and The Land Institute in Kansas, went, again, to use the technical term, ham on figuring out how to produce Kernza. They worked with this whole gene plasm and developed a variety that they could grow in parts of the Northern Plains, but also hopefully eventually other parts of the U.S. The idea of bringing perennial agriculture back to the heartland and the plains of the U.S. could have really meaningful impacts on restoring the topsoil there and preventing erosion that has been profoundly rampant in that area.

And every couple years, there are really scary studies that come out about the degree of topsoil loss in the Corn Belt, but it never makes huge headlines, and it really should. And the idea of putting a plant in there that has super long roots in the way that the prairies that covered that part of the country before settlers came in, say, 1850 and broke that big sod did, would just have profound benefits for stabilizing literally the land and our farmland against the ravages of climate change, be that drought or flooding. If you have wispy roots, it's easier for stuff to wash away.

Victoria Riskin: So with the Kernza, this is new to me, and I'm wondering, Caroline, when you're making a pastry or something, can you use less sugar because you have an already flavored grain?

Caroline Saunders: Oh, that's a great question. I think if you were really trying to reduce sugar, maybe you could reduce it by 5% or 10%. But I'm always hesitant about recommending a sugar reduction because sometimes sugar plays such an important chemical role in various ways. But maybe by a smidge.

Victoria Riskin: OK, a smidge maybe. I have to try this, but where am I going to get this Kernza? Oh, oh, I know. I have another question for you, too. I want to know where to get it, and I want to know if it could be planted elsewhere. I mean, you said the Rodale Institute has really put some effort in to try to bring this back to life as a choice. So can you grow it anywhere because it's perennial?

Caroline Saunders: Great question. Yeah, so first, where you can get it. I order mine from Perennial Pantry, which to my knowledge is one of the only places, if not the only place, really milling it and processing it into flours and other products in America. If any listeners know of anywhere else to get Kernza, I would love to know. But they're a great company and have been really just innovating and putting a ton of effort into this. So you can order directly from them.

 And I'm trying to remember what the Land Institute has put out there about where it can grow. I know that to date, it's been grown on really, really small acreage — I think in maybe thousands of acres. Which is tiny compared to… and I could be misspeaking there. It could be 10,000, but I think it's in the thousands. Tiny compared to the millions and millions of acres that normal wheat is on. And I know that it has been grown in parts of Kansas where the Land Institute is and parts of the Northern Plains. But I know that it can grow outside those areas, and I think there are a few people experimenting. So we'll have to look up its exact range, but I think I know it's larger than it is now, and there's a lot of promise there. And there are a lot of farmers that are excited about it because of the obvious soil health benefits.

Victoria Riskin: Fantastic. Thank you, Caroline, for this wonderful conversation about grains that I didn't know about. Kernza, I knew nothing about. Amaranth, that's not so rare. And I just feel very excited about these new choices that we can make and have in our pantry. So stay tuned. What's for dinner tonight? 

Caroline Saunders: For dinner tonight, it's gonna be easy pasta. Sometimes you get tired of the fancy cooking and it's just boxed pasta and a boxed sauce. There's no shame in it.

Victoria Riskin: You know, a good pasta with lots of butter, I don't know, it just doesn't get any better, right?

Caroline Saunders: It really doesn't. Exactly.

Victoria Riskin: Thank you. Well, simple supper, pasta and butter and maybe something fun to throw in that we have around. So thank you. Thank you for your wisdom and your good advice and your knowledge. I just love it. Thank you.

Caroline Saunders: Oh, likewise. Thank you for having me on. This is so much fun. Can't wait for next time.