Anti-Colonial Skillshare:

Make gluten-free flour from curly dock seeds!

You might have noticed these tall brown-topped spikey “weeds” with huge clusters of seeds growing in your area.

Making flour from them is easier than you may think.

The seeds can be picked at any time (even in the winter!), but I waited until they were brown to cut down on drying time.

They grow basically everywhere—the side of the street, backyards, etc. Try to find plants away from the street (and sprays).

Use a pillowcase to collect!

Hang your filled pillowcases in the sun for a day or two to allow little critters to escape and to get the seeds to dry.

Don’t forget to bring them inside at dusk so you don’t repopulate them work critters!

Remove the seeds and seed pods from the stalks. They come off better when they’re dry, so if they don’t come off easily, let them sun-dry for another day or so.

You can eat the seed pods (chaff?) so don’t bother winnowing the seeds. Just drink water since there’s a lot of fiber!

About the most satisfying thing is when you can just pull a whole glob of seeds off at once.

[video clip of hands pulling off seeds from stalk]

Once you have a bowl of seeds, you need to roast them a little to make sure they are absolutely dry.

I spread them on a pan and put them in a 350 F oven for 10 minutes, making sure to stir them up midway.

It smells sweet and floral while roasting. Careful not to burn them!

Once all of your seeds are roasted, it’s time to grind your flour!

I roasted about 5 pans full of seeds for my one batch of flour. I was able to pull seeds while one batch was roasting to keep things moving.

I don’t have fancy equipment. I have a hand blender with a small food processing attachment and a coffee grinder.

It was faster to pre-grind about a cup of the seeds in the food processor and then finish them off in the coffee grinder. Or you could just use the coffee grinder.

My pillowcase of seeds yielded about 4 cups of flour.

You can see how I went ham on grinding some seeds (they’re lighter) and not so ham on others.

I used 300g of my flour and about 200g of gluten free “white” flour to make bread. This flour handles way different than white flour, so you need some good binding agents like eggs.

Ngl—my loaf looked a bit like a lovingly formed cow pie. It bakes up good but, it took an hour.

The resulting bread is crumbly, seedy, and kinda heavy. I winged the recipe. I added 2 Tbsp of sugar to cut the bitterness.

It’s tasty! The texture is kinda like a hippie brownie. But the taste is hard to explain. Boba milk tea?

I ate it with homemade sauerkraut and liverwurst.

Better get to drinking my water or this bread will cause some clanking in my pipes.

I hope you enjoyed this skillshare. May you always have food and medicine close to home.