You can find frikah on the grocery store shelves, a modern day relative long severed from her ancient past as a non mechanized ingenuity. It seems today’s frikah is still a young grain that has been roasted or toasted, though its place as an mass ingredient in the store has replaced its magnificent standing as a unique process of transforming nature’s will into easy food.

A hull is a fairly inedible thin casing that can grow around each individual kernel of certain grains. Different grains can have varying degrees of hulls from ones that release the kernel easily to ones that hold it tightly. They have been known to help in the germination of the seed, but as far as for human food, they can be a challenge to remove from every dang kernel. Given that all of the unmodernized heritage wheats we grow at our farm come with firm hulls, it feels comfortable to speculate that hulless varieties may have come about through thousands of years of careful selection to evolve to the ones that give freely. The kernels from hulless varieties pop out without any extra effort in the threshing process.

Getting a hull off is a monumental task without machinery. While threshing can be as easy as stomping or whacking the seedhead, dehulling wheat seems to require either crushing the grain and winnowing away the hull or passing every grain through a narrow passage that sort of peels the hull off as it goes through (imagine passing it through a sort of pasta roller-type situation with an opening slight enough that it wicks the covering hull off without crushing the grain). Thinking about how much grain a person needs to eat to live, an efficient solution to dehulling is an important problem for the unlocking of nutrients to a community.

Ripening wheat passes through several stages to reach its harvestable place which are often called things like milky stage, soft dough, and hard dough- in that order. Soft dough usually has the best bread making qualities because the starches aren’t fully developed and the protein/ gluten potential is highest, while hard dough is a fully mature seed that is rich in starch and best prepared for future germination, or getting milled for doughs that use binders like eggs, etc. The milky stage, before the grain matures to soft dough, is full of a white goo that when a kernel is squeezed oozes out. As the kernel moves from milky to soft-dough is the perfect time to harvest for frikah- you’ll see why.

After harvesting at the early edge of soft-dough, the next step is to dip the grains in water and scorch the seedheads over an open fire. The fire will ideally burn away all the chaff, hull and other plant materials while the immature kernel is still green and holding enough water, hopefully, to repel the flame and be still standing in the end. 

Then as the name indicates, frikah which means to rub, the burnt wheat is rubbed free and winnowed for a smokey green wheat kernel. Interestingly as well, the heat from the fire also halts any further enzymatic processes thus holding the contents of the kernels in this stage. The kernels can now be dried and stored for later use.