Wameron36 Posted March 12, 2013 Hi all! Something I have been meaning to try for a little while are the seeds from the water lilies that could apparently be used to make a sort of flour. I'm often collecting flowers from these to use as tea, but never collected any seed pods. So I went for a bit of a kayack and found myself two big seed pods from what I believe are Nymphaea gigantea. Took them home and pull them apart, scraping all the seeds from within. The structure of the pod is quite cool. Imagine a mandarin with segments that were fused together, but within each segment were tons of little seeds. I then spread the seeds out and let them dry for a couple of days. To actually grind the seeds into a flour I tried two methods: mortar and pestle and a coffee grinder. The first lot were done with a mortar and pestle. This did work quite well but the outer shells and small material that surrounded each seed did not grind down very well. The ground, inside material was sifted out easily to produce a fine white flour. I would be happy to keep the shells and such mixed in with it also. The seeds: IMG_7643 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr In the process of grinding and sifting: IMG_7641 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr The sifted, ground, white flour: IMG_7647 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr Next I tried using a coffee grinder to see how well it would work at producing a flour. The rest of the seeds were put in, as well as the un-ground shells from the previous lot, and buzzed for a little while. This worked really well, turning it all into a fine, slightly darker coloured flour. You can see the difference in colour in the two sides of flour in this: IMG_7650 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr Here's an image showing the total amount of flour that was produced from 2 seed pods. This was roughly 2/3 of a cup. Smelt exactly like plain white flour you'd buy from the shop: IMG_7653 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/61438015@N05/8549378079/'> http://www.flickr.com/photos/61438015@N05/8549378079/'>IMG_7654 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr I also had a very small amount of seeds (roughly a tbsp) from some saw sedge (Gahnia spp.) I had collected a while ago. Using the mortar and pestle this were also ground into a flour. These seeds were much harder and tended to shoot out from the sides. I also found they contained a fir amount of moisture inside, which you can see by the darker base in the mortar. The flour from these was also a fair amount courser due ot the harder outer shells. http://www.flickr.com/photos/61438015@N05/8549379399/'> http://www.flickr.com/photos/61438015@N05/8549379399/'>IMG_7655 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/61438015@N05/8550479580/'> http://www.flickr.com/photos/61438015@N05/8550479580/'>IMG_7662 by http://www.flickr.com/people/61438015@N05/'>Wameron, on Flickr Sometime within the next few days I will make a small johny cake with each to try it out. Likely plain water lily seed, and the sedge seed will be mixed 50:50 with plain flour to add a little more volume. So I'll give that a shot, and report back how they turn out! Cheers, Cameron 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
