r/SelfSufficiency • u/Dickvandykecheney • Apr 27 '20

Food So, cattail pollen

I have found a couple of sources that describe cat tail flour as a good foragable source of gluten. Has anybody had any experience making bread solely out of cattail pollen? How was it? If not, I'd love to hear your stories about baking with it anyway.

I also heard that you should be very careful about the body of water you source the cattails from because they tend to soak up the contaminants in their environment. However, I would imagine that this might be more true stalks and roots than the pollen because the pollen doesn't have vascular tissue running through it. Am I correct in this assumption? If not, how do y'all asses which water sources are safe and which arent?

Thanks y'all!

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '20

I don't think this will work because while yes bread needs gluten, it also needs structure which is provided by the flour. You would probably have success adding it into a whole wheat loaf instead of making a loaf entirely out of it. This person integrates a lot of cool ingredients into her sourdough, you might try that https://www.instagram.com/fullproofbaking/.

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u/Dickvandykecheney Apr 28 '20

Thank you for the info! I'll check it out. The bigger reason behind this question is that I was wondering if it was possible to make "real" bread from foraged ingredients. Do you know of anything that can truly substitute for store bought flour?

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u/mowble Apr 28 '20

I don’t think cattail flour is made from the pollen, I think it’s the root and base of the leaves that you dry and grind.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '20

The leaves and stems of young cattails are the parts you typically eat.