Orzo GROSSI LEONESSA – antico orzo integrale

Origin: Lesignado De’ Bagni (PR)

Producer: Azienda agricola Claudio Grossi

Variety: Leonessa barley, limited production of ancient whole-grain barley

Cultivar: Leonessa

Altitude: lowland

Processing: hand-threshed, cleaned and roasted

Roast: drum-roasted, at a temperature between 110° and 150°

Flavors: intense, rare, healthful, with a buttery baked-cookie aftertaste

Body: full and enveloping

Acidity: balanced, pleasantly saline

Selection: Massimo Bonini

The prized Leonessa ancient barley is a whole-grain barley grown by Azienda Agricola di Claudio Grossi at an altitude of 400 meters. The plants reach 2.5 meters in height and are hand-threshed. It is grown using a natural, indigenous method based on the ancient influence of lunar cycles. Sown at the new moon in October to give it the strength to grow healthy and vigorous, it is harvested during the waning moon, with all its nutritional and tonic properties intact.
Barley is the story of Grossi. He roasts it using the traditional closed-drum method. Torrefazione Lady  Cafè continues processing it by grinding it for infusions, pulverizing it and turning it into flour or paste for gelato and pastry preparations. Barley flour, used in part as a substitute for wheat flour, lends an extraordinary roasted aroma, especially in the aftertaste. A bakery turns it into bread (a traditional Parmesan micca, made with sourdough, exceptionally crisp and fragrant with that roast aroma that lingers long after a culatello sandwich) and cookies (rustic morning cookies). But as a beverage, it restores barley’s nobility: self-sufficiency during the Fascist era, poverty, cold farmhouses and villages shrouded in fog, a naked, large, wild seed. Natural pearling leaves its “organoleptic properties” strictly intact. Intense, rare, and healthful, it is an excellent coffee substitute even today, just as it was in the past, when it was called “the poor man’s coffee.” It can be prepared in a moka pot or simply steeped. It contains 15% protein and almost 10% fiber, more than half of which is soluble, with positive effects on the body.