Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (40 page)

At the conclusion of my tour the Hostess
bakers gave me a few loaves, and on the drive up to Dave Miller’s I sampled three
types of neo–Wonder Bread. The Soft 100% Whole Wheat smelled strongly of yeast and
molasses and was a shade darker than the white–as–Wonder Bread “Made with Whole
Grain” loaf. The two loaves tasted equally sweet, which is to say
very
,
and though the 100 percent whole wheat was not quite as cottony soft, I’m not sure
I could have told them apart with my eyes closed. (Since I was driving, I decided to
postpone that particular test.) My least favorite loaf was the Smart White, the one with
the fiber equivalent of (but not the actual fiber from) 100 percent whole wheat. After
an initial impression of sweetness, I registered several distinctly off flavors,
probably from the cottonseed, wood pulp, and other nonwheat fibers and the minerals
added to it—all the fibrous and rocky “garbage” that Hostess had baked into
it.

After a while, all the neo–Wonder Breads
began to seem the same, and less like bread than nutrient delivery systems. Yet it
isn’t at all clear that such a reductive approach to nutrition—in which wheat
seeds are broken down into their component parts and then reassembled along with other
processed plant parts, some minerals, an additive or two derived from petroleum, and a
ton of yeast to loft the whole deal—actually yields a healthy or even a healthier loaf
of bread. These breads were really nutritional conceits, clever ways to work the words
“whole grain” or “whole wheat” onto a package, now that those
magic words constitute an implied health claim. But the idea of whole grain in these
products clearly counted for more than the reality, which Hostess treated as something
to overcome, disguise, or merely allude to. These were notional breads, and eventually
they turned to cotton in my mouth. I was reminded of Richard Bourdon’s
saliva test for good bread: Did a wad of it make your mouth water?
These three flunked.

I had heard from Chad that Dave Miller had
once owned a bakery called Wunder Brot, so when I showed up at the door to his
bakery—basically a suite of rooms attached to his house, which was tucked into a lovely
remote hillside in the Sierra Foothills, south and east of Chico—I presented him with a
couple of loaves of late-model Wonder Bread. He looked slightly horrified, but managed a
smile. A slender man in his late forties with a trim goatee, Dave was dressed in a crisp
white pocket T-shirt and clogs. I wondered if this was the first plastic-bagged loaf of
sliced bread ever to cross his threshold.

Miller’s Bake House is a one-man show.
It was a Thursday, and Dave was grinding wheat and mixing dough for his weekly bake the
next morning. He kept one eye on the mill, a stone wheel encased in a handsomely crafted
wooden cabinet made in Austria, and the other on his Artofex mixer, an old-timey,
pink-painted contraption from Switzerland. A pair of steel arms moved lazily up and down
through the bowl of wet flour, convincingly simulating the action of human hands
kneading dough.

Dave Miller is an uncompromising baker, as
fiercely devoted to whole grains and wet doughs and natural leavens as Richard Bourdon.
(If not more so: Only one of his breads contains
any
white flour.) But compared
with his voluble, flamboyant mentor, Miller comes across as very much the Protestant
baker, spare with his pronouncements and something of an ascetic. Though he used to own
bakeries and manage employees (including Chad Robertson), for the past seven years he
has stripped his vocation down to its Thoreauvian essentials: one man, some sacks of
wheat, a couple of machines, and an oven.
Miller’s Bake House is
almost completely off the grid: Solar panels power the mill and the cold room where he
retards his loaves, and the Italian deck oven is fired with wood that he chops himself.
I asked if the wood imparted flavor to the bread. “It’s not about the
flavor. It’s that I would rather not be a party to wars for oil.”

The afternoon I visited, Miller was
agonizing over whether to add a pinch of ascorbic acid—often used to strengthen
low-protein flours—to his Kamut dough. Dave disdained additives on principle, but the
crop of Kamut (an ancient variety of durum wheat) that a farmer had grown for him had
come in weak—low in protein—this year, and the loaves were somewhat depressed as a
result. The ascorbic acid promised to help the dough hold a bit more air, but adding it
meant veering ever so slightly from “the right path,” as the Miller’s
Bake House Web site describes his approach. Short of landing at a bakery on Alpha
Centauri, I could not have traveled farther from the Hostess plant, where ascorbic acid
is one of the more natural ingredients in use. “I have met the bread monk,”
I jotted in my notebook.

Dave took me into the back room to see his
mill. It was a tall wooden contraption with a hopper on top that held fifty pounds of
wheat at a time, feeding it gradually through an aperture that opened onto the sandwich
of revolving stones inside. Though “gradually” does not do justice to the
glacial pace of this machine. The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in
single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster
risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact,
Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase “nose to the grindstone”: a
scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour
beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as
attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of
warm, tan flour that slowly accumulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a
whiff. Freshly
milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant,
redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I’d read
about the etymology of the word “flour”—that it is the flower, or best part,
of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled
delicious.

That whiff of fresh flour delivered a little
epiphany. Up to now, I had been more or less indifferent to whole wheat. I liked it
okay, probably more than most, but I ate it mainly because it was better for me than
white bread, not because it tasted better. So you might say that I, too, liked the idea
of whole grain more than the actual experience, just like the bakers and food scientists
at Hostess. Though I didn’t mind the coarseness, or the density, even the best
whole-grain breads usually tasted as though they were being stingy with their flavor,
holding something back. I hadn’t yet tried Dave’s bread, but the fragrance
of his flour made me think I had probably never really experienced the full potential of
whole-grain wheat, something I now suddenly very much wanted to do.

Dave milled his own grain because that was
the only way he could buy wheat directly from farmers and guarantee the freshness of his
flour. “The moment the seed is opened up is the moment of its greatest potential.
As soon as it’s milled, it begins to oxidize, losing the energy that could be
nourishing us. That’s also the moment of maximum flavor before it begins to
fade.”

Dave’s foremost concern as a baker has
always been with health. His own “eureka moment” came in the early eighties
at a bakery in Minneapolis, with a taste of a 100 percent whole-grain bread. “One
bite of that bread and I could feel my whole body respond. It just felt so right.”
Extracting the full nutritional value from wheat dictates every step of his baking
process, yet Dave sees no trade-off between health and flavor, and in fact believes that
the flavor of bread is a good indicator of its nutritional quality. In this, grains are
a little like fruit,
the fragrant ripeness of which signifies they
have arrived at their nutritional peak. But, unlike fruit, grains also need to be
processed with care—properly fermented and baked—in order to achieve peak taste and
nutrition. For Dave that means a wet dough to thoroughly cook the grain, a long, slow
fermentation, and a thorough bake in a hot oven.

Dave invited me to spend the night so I
could watch the whole twenty-four-hour process unfold from start to finish. When I
dragged myself from bed the following morning at five, he had already been at it for a
couple of hours, firing up the oven and shaping loaves that had risen in the walk-in
cooler overnight. Dave’s doughs were by far the wettest I’d seen (up to 104
percent hydration
^*
), and he handled them as gently
as newborns, turning them in their buckets even less frequently than Chad did. Dave was
long accustomed to working by himself (“I like baking alone; it’s such an
intense sensory thing”), but by the second day he was willing to let me handle his
babies, showing me how to shape the bâtards and pan breads. Some of these doughs were so
wet that to keep them from sticking you dipped your hands in water rather than flour. It
was monastically quiet in the bakery as we worked, still dark outside, and the smells
were captivating: malty and floral and, as soon as Dave began feeding loaves into the
oven, irresistible.

But Dave wouldn’t let me taste any
bread until it had properly cooled and “set,” so I couldn’t have a
taste until I was already on the road home. The warm loaves filled the car with the
aroma I had smelled in the mill room. Don’t tell Dave, but I was able to hold off
only as long as it took to steer my car out of his driveway.

The bread was a revelation. I felt as though
I was tasting wheat for
the very first time. The flavor held nothing
back; it was rich, nutty, completely obliging in its sweetness. The crumb was moist and
glossy. I ate a whole loaf before I got to the highway.

But the bread was not perfect. There could
have been much more contrast between crumb and crust, which wasn’t crisp at all,
and the loaves were broad and low-slung. “You’re always fighting gravity
with whole grain,” Dave had said earlier that morning, as he withdrew from the
oven a wooden peel laden with loaves that looked a tad depressed. “But I
don’t mind a dense loaf if it’s moist.” Dave had accepted the
trade-off: flavor and nutrition for volume. A sacrifice of air.

Dave Miller’s bread was delicious, but
not everything I’d dreamed of in a whole-grain loaf. Yet what I tasted and smelled
in his bakery made me determined to bake with whole grains from now on—to see if I
couldn’t get some of those flavors in my bread, but with a tougher crust and a lot
more air. Baking white bread suddenly seemed boring. I’d had a glimpse, a taste,
of what was possible, and it was so much more than I’d ever imagined. A good
whole-grain loaf became my grail, and I spent the next few months baking 100 percent
whole-wheat loaves one after another.

That first month, a great many worthy brown
bricks came out of my oven, loaves decidedly more virtuous than tasty. The G-forces at
work in my oven had never seemed so oppressive, as if I were suddenly baking on another,
much larger planet. I struggled for weeks with sourness. The whole-grain flour seemed to
overstimulate my sourdough culture, inspiring prodigious outpourings of acid from the
bacteria while quickly tuckering out the yeasts. I wasn’t sure if I should
attribute the anemic oven spring I was experiencing to exhausted yeasts or to the sharp
bran knives slashing my gluten to ribbons.

I was still using Chad Robertson’s basic
recipe, substituting whole-grain flour for white, and soon realized I needed to make
some adjustments. I read that since bran softens as it absorbs water, those little
knives could be somewhat dulled with a wetter dough and a longer rest before mixing. So
I stepped up to a 90 percent hydration and extended the autolyse to an hour. The wetter
mix seemed to soften the bran, yet left me with me a dough that proved trickier to shape
and build tension into—yet another cause of lousy oven spring. Dave Miller’s
words—“You’re always fighting gravity with whole grains”—rang in my
ears after every one of those disappointing bakes. Yet I wasn’t quite prepared to
give up on air.