Cooking Amaranth: What You Should Know About It

Why you should cook amaranth

Amaranth is rich in fiber, and high-quality protein and also provides large amounts of magnesium, calcium, and iron.

• While you can eat amaranth raw, your body can absorb more of the healthy ingredients if you cook the pseudo-cereal before eating it.
• The reason for this is the phytic acid contained in amaranth. This primarily binds iron, but also the minerals magnesium and calcium.
• If you eat amaranth raw, your body cannot remove and absorb these substances from the grains.
  Also, phytic acid blocks certain digestive enzymes your body needs to digest protein. Therefore, the high-quality protein in the pseudo-grain actually remains unused.
• For a while, phytic acid was considered harmful if consumed in large quantities. This theory has now been refuted. The only harmful thing about phytic acid is that your body cannot absorb the healthy ingredients at all.
• You can remove a large part of the phytic acid from amaranth if you soak the seeds for a long time and then boil them.

Cooking amaranth – the healthy way of preparation

We explained why it makes sense to cook amaranth in the paragraph above. Now we will also show you how this works.

• First, wash the grains thoroughly with hot water.
• Then soak amaranth in water for several hours, preferably overnight.
• Strain the soaked amaranth over a sieve and put it in a pot with plenty of fresh water. You need about three times the amount of water.
• Briefly boil the pseudocereal and then let it simmer for about 20 to 30 minutes. The procedure is similar to cooking rice.
• Also similar to rice, you can use amaranth as a side dish or process it in other ways.