Lesson of the day: If you're going to cook with an ingredient you've never used before (and never looked for at the grocery store before), do some research first.
Tonight I'm cooking dinner for our first cookbook project of the year and picked a recipe that included semi-pearled farro. I know I've eaten farro before and really liked it, but have never cooked it or bought it before. I didn't think it would be very difficult and I thought farro was fairly common. If not at the regular grocery store, I thought it would be simple to find at a natural foods store or someplace like Whole Foods. However, if I had done my research, I would have learned from sites like this that it's not so easy! It seems like the easiest place to find semi-pearled farro is on Amazon, although, since it's from Italy, it's kind of pricey. I'm sure there must be someplace near us that carries it, but where?
We went to Costco and Pathmark when we were out in Queens for our car maintenance but found no farro. I searched Whole Foods finding nothing, but, after asking the workers (who were very nice and helpful), they directed me to a small area of the pasta section which had three bags of farro. But it was whole farro, not semi-pearled farro, so that wasn't going to work. While at the store, I looked at the products section of the website for the nearby natural foods store and they had no results for farro at all. After locking up my muscles walking in the snow all day, I didn't want to trek around looking for farro (especially if the mission would fail in the end) and decided to start looking for a substitute.
After researching, I decided to go with pearled barley. Let's see how this turns out! And I think it's safe to say I've learned my lesson about buying farro...
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