In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (18 page)

Diversity was advantageous in any number of ways: in protecting the food supply, in offering a wide variety of staples, and in the novel methods one applied to make these ingredients palatable. And these methods often came from a home baker, not a professional.

I suppose I come closest to this age-old problem of variability when I bake a loaf with whatever grains happen to be around, figuring out how to make them work. I do this most often with barley, spelt, and rye. The results have ranged from dense and gummy, when I first began baking with them, to remarkably good, with a flavor impossible to conjure from white and whole wheat flours. But these experiments took time. The only modern-day equivalent to the problems faced in the premodern era might be in the gluten-free baking now going on with corn, amaranth, teff, and buckwheat. All these grains take knowledge and practice to master. Inconsistency and unfamiliarity, when measured against the predictable yardstick of white flour, will leave you feeling almost dumb and incompetent. In the past, I wonder if bakers felt this way, too. Whether they were really dissatisfied, say, with a dense bread, or whether they craved it because density meant concentrated calories. Hunger again—it changes our perception.

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D
espite the higher nutritional value of whole grain breads, white flour has been prized since antiquity. Whole grain flour tends to be more assertive and at times bitter, though it can also have a deeper and more complex flavor, if you coax the dough properly in a long fermentation. If milled coarsely, the bran can end up as tiny flecks that remain on the tongue when you’re eating the bread—pleasant to some, but not to all. But, again, these assessments need to be viewed in context, because whole grain flour was far easier to produce than white until relatively recently. Once you begin to mill the grains into flour, a number of technological and social questions arise, namely, how will you grind it and who will actually do the work?

In ancient Rome,
pistor
s ground the grain. According to Pliny the Elder, it was “generally known” that the
pistor
was a chained prisoner of war, often a rough foreigner, who spoke poor Latin. He was given a wooden mortar and pestle, reinforced with metal, and put to work. This was especially tough because
the grain was spelt
, a subspecies of wheat that has a hull which needs to be broken to release the kernel. (This is also one reason why spelt is expensive—the grain must be hulled, adding one more step to the milling process and reducing the yield of the harvested kernels.) The
pistor
had another job, too: making pearled spelt, which involved rubbing the grains with chalk or sand to remove the bran so that the grain could be made into a staple porridge known as
puls
.

If, as I did, you want to see what a
pistor
was up to, here’s what you do. Buy some wheat, rye, or spelt berries (which lucky for you will have already been hulled) from the bulk bins at a natural foods store and put a tablespoon or two into a mortar. Now crush the grains with a pestle. (There’s no need to chain yourself while you do this, unless you’re into that sort of thing.) The grains will jump around a bit so use a grinding motion, too. Within a minute or so, you will see white flour and flecks of darker bran. The white stuff comes from the endosperm of the grain and makes white flour. It contains protein and starch. The hard outer coating is the bran, consisting of minerals, vitamins, more protein, as well as the insoluble fiber that passes through your gut, feeding your intestinal biota along the way. The germ, or embryo of the seed, is made up of oils and nutrients, though you can’t see it when you grind the grain. What amazed me when I first tried this hand-milling technique was just how easily the endosperm split into a white, flourlike powder. The starch doesn’t have the fibrous material to hold it together, so it just dissolves, with very little work. The bran, which evolved to withstand brief bouts of rain, aridity, and pests, is much tougher. If you taste a bit of this meal you’ve created, you’ll notice the bran is gritty; the flour fine. But crushing the grain was just the first step of the
pistor
’s toil.

Now comes the hard part, which is to remove those brown flecks of bran from the white flour. I kept pounding the grain, hoping the bran would break down into as fine a substance as the starch. No such luck. So I turned to the next obvious solution, sifting. Flour was sifted through reed baskets in ancient Egypt. In milling operations, I’ve also seen flour sifted through a taut, vibrating cloth, or a series of progressively finer mesh screens, separating the bran and white flour. I poured mine into a flat, circular sieve and shook. That took out a bit of the bran, but obviously the sieve wasn’t fine enough because most of it got through. So I tried a finer mesh. Then I tried cheesecloth. Now imagine all these tasks, pounding, grinding, and sifting, for entire days with a chain around your ankle—you get the idea. To do this work on any scale would be enormous, and by scale, I mean enough flour for a few thousand loaves, not one or two tablespoons.

Try this out and you will realize why the earliest bakers made whole grain breads. Millers went through the laborious task of sifting, or bolting, flour only if someone was willing to pay them enough money and if they had slaves who did the work. (It’s been argued that agriculture was the foundation for socially stratified societies, and in this one example, you might see why.) Eventually, hand milling evolved into horse-drawn mills, giving the
pistor
a break. The slaves eventually became the bakers, who were celebrated in Rome. But even in this ancient era, there were many grades of flour, from the finest white, to white with a bit of bran, to coarsely milled flour, to the lowest castoffs of bran saved mostly for livestock, which is still the case today. Those who ate these dark brown coarse loaves, made of barley and bran, were often the poorest of the poor.

There was a centuries-old stigma attached to such dark bread as well as attempts to mask its nature. Jewish bakers in eastern Europe would sift fine rye meal over dark rye and barley loaves so that they looked, well, more white. This might have been
the origin of marble rye
, that mixed dark and light loaf still sold today. But there was also a historic recognition that whole grains were healthier. As Pliny said: “Among the ancients, too, it was generally thought that the heavier wheat is, the more wholesome it is.”
Hippocrates
, the Greek historian, thought barley aided health. He wasn’t wrong, considering the high level of beta-glucans, or soluble fiber, which inhabits not just the bran but the endosperm of barley and has the benefit of lowering blood cholesterol, tempering blood sugar, and reducing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. No wonder
barley sustained soldiers
and gladiators in ancient Rome, who were known as
hordearii
—barley eaters.

But, Hippocrates and other outliers excepted, viewing whole grains as healthy gained prominence only once the diseases of modern life blossomed. Now of course we are barraged with the full panoply of health benefits from eating whole grains despite the fact that so few of us approach the recommended daily amount. Throughout history, whole grains were the default loaf. It’s easy to overstate this irony now—the poor ate the healthiest bread!—because this was true only to a point. Take into account that coarse flour could contain insects, rodent droppings, dirt, perhaps small stones and straw, and it becomes clear why people valued the more expensive, sifted stuff. Whole flour might have been more healthy, but much of it was fit only for livestock. Plus, white flour wasn’t valued only for its social connotations of purity; it was also a more concentrated source of carbohydrates that the body metabolizes more quickly into energy. Bran has other essential nutrients, and protein as well, but its fiber passes through the body. That’s why white flour has about 9 percent more calories than the same amount of whole wheat. Then there’s the taste quotient: because amylase enzymes in saliva convert starch to sugar in the first stage of digestion, white flour tastes sweeter than whole wheat. Yet even white flour could be subject to adulteration with toxic whitening agents, especially during wheat shortages. That’s why the regulation and policing of millers and bakers has been an enduring concern since at least the Middle Ages.

This idea of white bread as preferred and aspirational arises through history, so that in seventeenth-century Paris, laborers would choose three pounds of white bread to four pounds of whole wheat. In one instance,
a prison riot
broke out in Paris in 1751 when the inmates rejected dark bread, hurling bottles at guards. Historian Steven Kaplan, who relates these incidents in his works, does say that while Parisians favored white bread, they were also viewed as extravagant by the rest of the nation. “Everyone understood that the whiter the flour, the smaller the number of people who could be fed by a given amount of grain,” he writes. With bread the main source of calories, sifting out the bran lost 30 to 50 percent of the kernel, depending on the mill and the sifting method. That meant everyone had to share the white flour that remained, with the aristocracy first in line. Unlike Parisians, peasants in the French countryside weren’t about to waste half of what they grew and so ate a combination of wheat, rye, and barley well into the nineteenth century.

Sadly, this waste continues today, if you consider the vast amount of calories, essential minerals, and nutrients in the bran and germ that get tossed aside in the milling of white flour, which extracts only around 72 percent of the kernel.
With every 100 grams of wheat bran
left behind, 216 calories are discarded, including 16 grams of high-quality protein. Along with the bran, the nutrient-dense aleurone layer of the endosperm is rejected as well. In a food-scarce world, where wheat provides one fifth of calories, not only is a vast amount of food being wasted, but the most nutritious part is being siphoned off for livestock.

But whole grains have long been a hard sell. After the French Revolution, the constituent assembly proposed a
pain d’égalité
—a loaf defined as three quarters wheat, one quarter rye, with all of the bran intact. It was anything but cake. No one would eat aristocratic white bread in a democracy. But even more telling, Kaplan told me,
pain d’égalité
was never adopted because the ingrained preference for white flour in French society could never be broken, even among those who largely ate whole grain breads.
Pain d’égalité
was more ideal than reality, and white bread truly remained the aspirational loaf, even among those revolutionary peasants who could not afford to eat it.

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I
f millers, however, could produce white flour on a massive scale and thus bring down the price of white flour, then the egalitarian impulse could be fulfilled at least in the consumer realm. That’s what happened by the late nineteenth century, with the advent of mechanical roller mills that easily separated bran, endosperm, and germ.
Bakers could now rely
on a consistent supply of refined white flour and everyone could eat white bread. Customers looked forward to consistency and predictability, rather than variability, and they would come to fight for it.

This shouldn’t be a big surprise. Remember the TV episode where Seinfeld offers an old lady $50 for the last loaf of Jewish rye she bought from the New York bakery, then grabs it and runs down the street when she refuses? People don’t want variation, inconsistency, excuses, or a different loaf. They want their bread, and they want it now. Mariah Roberts, who runs the lively Beach Pea Baking Co. in Kittery, Maine, told me a story about a customer who was fuming after the person ahead of him bought the last four loaves of her most popular bread, a delicious
fougasse
with rosemary, olive oil, and coarse salt. He was unwilling to even consider another choice for his Thanksgiving dinner. So he cursed out the woman in front of him and stomped out of the store.