OK, I have the Amaranth to experiment with.
I went to fetch a book by George Mateljan, who uses it in a lot of his "Health Valley" brand of processed foods, and was very surprised to discover that he mentions it but has no recipes for it.
He claims, by the way, to have been the person who re-introduced it from Mexico.
The reason he did not include it, he wrote, was because "it is not as widely available as other grains that I do include".
OK, but it's easy to grow and readily available from seed! My garden is full of it because it was in a bird-seed mixture and has now spread all over the place from spilled bird-seed!
He suggests cooking it like rice, which gives it a porridge-like texture. Bob of Bob's Red Mill says to use the flour to replace 1/4 of the wheat in baking. I would assume that would work best in quick breads and pastries. It's in George Mateljan's cookies. I think it also shows up in Amaranth crackers for toddlers. It's not wheat and probably less allergenic.
I think, tho, that it would also work well cracked (to improve digestion) in "seed breads" such as Germans make ("Samenbrot"), and, in fact, I think it is actually a fairly common ingredient that way in some specialty breads. I will check the next time I'm at Trader Joe's (which is owned by a big German conglomerate). In that case, you would not grind it down to flour, so it would not interfere as much with the development of the gluten. If it were used as a coating on the outside, it wouldn't interfere at all, and there wouldn't be any need to work it into the dough.
Lilya, we need someone like Rostik to pose, holding something like an Amaranth cookie, to make a soviet-style propaganda poster (except with some subtle cultural changes heh heh heh), with a caption something like "AMARANTH: FOOD FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF HEROES".
