What is the secret ingredient in Paxton C. Webster’s (’27) fry bread? Quinoa—and more specifically, popped quinoa. Webster, a food science major, has been developing a cookbook starring popped quinoa for people living in rural Bolivia, a country where quinoa is re-emerging as a farming staple. Webster’s cookbook is part of a larger project at BYU and other universities to help reintegrate quinoa into native Bolivians’ diets in more accessible and modern ways.
Native Bolivians pop quinoa to “mellow the bitterness,” says Webster. Popping it also makes it easier to grind into flour. With rising inflation and few ingredient options in rural areas, quinoa flour is a readily available alternative to wheat flour.
“The unique thing about quinoa,” adds food science professor Laura Jefferies (BS ’94, MS ’98), “is that it naturally has the nine essential amino acids. . . . There’s a lot of nutritional value to it.”
Jefferies and her colleagues wanted to make a quinoa-based cookbook to give Bolivians creative recipes for baked goods they could sell to make a living. But Webster also sees the cookbook as a means for Bolivians to make modern dishes from ingredients they can grow themselves. “There’s everything from quinoa cheesecake to quinoa fudge to quinoa banana bread, and everything was tailored to stuff that they have in Bolivia,” he says.
With an authentic Bolivian clay pot seasoned with llama fat, Webster experiments with different varieties of quinoa and methods for popping it in Jefferies’ lab. “You have to soak it, and then you have to dry it to a certain moisture content, and then you pop it at a really high heat,” he says. But not every recipe is cut out for quinoa. “It definitely has a taste,” Webster discovered when he tried to make an orange cake. “It was horrible, . . . one of the biggest fails I’ve had in the kitchen ever.”
Webster has traveled to Bolivia to teach a cooking class, get feedback from Bolivians about the recipes, and discover other ways his research can improve the lives of rural Bolivians. “We may not speak the same language or eat the same things,” Webster says, “but I think that our spirits are all the same.”
