Indian Ricegrass

Indian ricegrass is a perennial bunchgrass that grows in dry sandy soils, forming tufts of very fine, wiry stems about thirty to seventy centimeters tall. In late spring the stems open into airy, branching clusters of spikelets that look like a delicate cloud of tiny flowers.

Each seed is small and black or dark brown when its outer layer is removed, but it is wrapped in a dense coat of long white hairs that gives it a woolly look. The grain inside is dense and starchy with a flavor often described as nutty and slightly sweet with a touch of earthiness.

Whole seeds were harvested wild and are today sold mainly as milled flour, with some seed available for restoration plantings.

The species is native to western North America, from southern Canada through the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau to northern Mexico, and it thrives in sandy, rocky and sagebrush country. It was long classified in the genera Oryzopsis and then Achnatherum, and recent botanical treatments place it in Eriocoma, so all three names appear in older books.

The word ricegrass comes from the resemblance of the seeds to small rice grains. The Latin species name hymenoides means resembling a membrane, which refers to the thin papery scale around the seed. The grass was never fully domesticated, though wild stands were managed by gathering and by seed scattering.

Indian ricegrass seed was an important wild food for Indigenous peoples of the arid West, including Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, Navajo, Hopi and Apache communities. Harvesters gathered the seed by beating the ripe heads into baskets or burning off the hairs, then parched and ground it into meal that was made into cakes, mush and a thin gruel. The seed has been reported in archaeological sites in the Great Basin, which indicates a long history of use.

In the twentieth century the grass came to wider notice as a valuable forage plant for livestock and wildlife and as a revegetation species on disturbed desert lands. The Natural Resources Conservation Service released several selected cultivars, including one named Nezpar from Idaho.

In the 1990s a Montana company began marketing flour from cultivated Indian ricegrass under the brand name Montina, presenting it as a gluten-free flour for baking. The grass is still used in restoration seed mixes, and growers must manage its notoriously slow and irregular germination, which comes from a hard seed coat and dormancy.

The seed is milled into a coarse, grayish flour that is used alone or blended with other gluten-free flours in bread, pancakes, muffins and crackers. Because it has a nutty taste, it works well in rustic baked goods and porridge.

In traditional Indigenous cooking, ground seed was mixed with water into mush or pressed into small cakes cooked on hot stones. The plant itself is grazed by cattle, sheep, deer and other wildlife, and it is among the more common species used in land reclamation and erosion control in the arid West.

Because the seed supply is limited, Indian ricegrass flour remains a specialty product rather than a mainstream grain.

Indian ricegrass seed contains protein, starch, fiber and minerals, and the flour was marketed as a protein-rich gluten-free option. It is botanically unrelated to wheat, barley and rye and is considered free of the gluten proteins that trigger celiac disease, but anyone with celiac disease should look for products that are labeled gluten-free and protected from cross-contamination in milling. There are few published human studies, so claims should be treated with caution.