User blog:LimeySkull/Amaranth: The Mis-Utilized Grain

Amaranth is quite mis-utilized in pam's harvestcraft. Currently it is able to be used to produce flour and basically little else, but this is a sever misinterpretation of this grain.

Amaranth + Mortar and Pestle should result in cornmeal instead of flour. From a gameplay standpoint, flour can already be made with 18 items excluding amaranth. That is a TON of things, and especially since wheat itself is both used for flour AND quite overabundant it is honestly a waste to have yet another flour ingredient. Meanwhile, cornmeal can only be made with corn while it is used to make 8 items, and indirectly is used in a total of 35 recipes. Before you say "but yeah, its cornmeal. It should be made with corn," hear me out.

Cornmeal products are used a lot in Mexican cooking, but during Mexico's pre-Columbian period The Aztecs cultivated amaranth as the staple grain crop where it was used to make tamales and tortillas among other things. Plus while you may not butter it like corn, cornmeal often loses much of the corn flavor and many of the cornmeal recipes could, in theory, fesable be made IRL with amaranth instead since both are decently mild and gluten-free. This is important since gluten content is often a huge barrier preventing the substitution of different flours for each other due to the qualities they impart on the finished product. Its only due to the politics of the grains involved during the Columbian period that Amaranth isn't more common in what are now corn recipes anyways.

https://medium.com/@cholaconcello/foods-of-the-americas-amaranth-the-outlaw-grain-946957d9e51 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/food-science/amaranth-flour