Grains for Every Season: Rethinking Our Way with Grains

From the James Beard Award-winning and perennially bestselling Six Seasons series, comes a book that applies a maximalist approach to flavor and texture to cooking with grains.

These knock-your-socks-off recipes include salads, soups, pastas, pizzas, grain bowls, breads―and even desserts. McFadden works as intuitively, as surprisingly, as deliciously with whole grains as he does with vegetables. Grains for Every Season will change the way we cook with barley, brown rice, buckwheat, corn, millet, oats, quinoa, rye, wheat (bulgur, farro, freekeh, spelt, wheat berries, and whole wheat flour), and wild rice.

The book’s 200 recipes are organized into chapters by grain type, unlocking information on where each one comes from, how to prepare it, and why the author―the multi-award-winning chef/owner of Ava Gene’s in Portland―can’t live without it. McFadden uses grains both whole and milled into flour. The many gluten-free recipes are clearly designated.

McFadden reveals how each grain can be used in both savory and sweet recipes, from Meat Loaf with Barley and Mushrooms to Peanut Butter-Barley Cookies; from Buckwheat, Lime and Herb Salad to Buckwheat Cream Scones. He folds quinoa into tempura batter to give veggies extra pop and takes advantage of the nutty flavor of spelt flour for Cast-Iron Skillet Spelt Cinnamon Rolls. Four special foldout sections highlight seasonal variations on grain bowls, stir-fries, pizzas, pilafs, and more, to show how flexible and satisfying cooking with grains can be.

“A gift to readers ... For McFadden, flavor comes first.”―Booklist, Top 10 Cookbooks of the Year

Named a Best Book of the Year and a Holiday Gift Pick by Amazon
Named a Best Cookbook the Year by Food52, Booklist, and Library Journal
James Beard Award Finalist

Joshua McFadden is a bringing fresh energy to Berney Farm, a historic fifty-acre gem in Springdale, Oregon. Here, he's building a unique agricultural complex where farming, food, and design come together in creative collaborations. When he's not working the land, Joshua is a sought-after consultant in the food world—helping to craft packaged and prepared foods, launch brands from the ground up, and rethink what fast-casual and fast food can be. Joshua’s first book, Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables, co-written with Martha Holmberg, earned him a James Beard Award in 2018. His second, Grains for Every Season: Rethinking Our Way with Grains, was a James Beard Award finalist in 2021. Follow him on Instagram at @jj__mc.

Martha Holmberg is a food writer who has authored or co-authored nine cookbooks. Modern Sauces was a James Beard Award finalist. Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables, written with chef Joshua McFadden, won the James Beard Award, and Grains for Every Season, also with McFadden, was a James Beard Award finalist. Holmberg was the editor in chief of Fine Cooking magazine for a decade, the food editor of The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Oregon, and the founder of MIX magazine. She studied cooking at La Varenne in Paris, where she worked for several years as a private chef. Holmberg lives in Spokane, Washington. Follow her on Instagram @marthaholmberg.