In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (19 page)

From this vantage point, diversity becomes a defect, a source of inconsistency that’s unpleasant on the palate. So wheat was bred to produce more consistent results in the bakery as well. Though some might pine for this loss of biodiversity—all the rare landrace wheat varieties, now known as heritage or heirloom wheat—the triumph of more productive wheat varieties and the day-in, day-out consistency that could be achieved was nothing short of revolutionary in the history of grains. If wheat was uniform, bakers no longer had to figure out what to do with flour of varying quality. They would not have to adjust their recipes dramatically for different harvests. Bread lovers would not have to shift among a diet of coarse grains, barley, bran, and beans to supplant scarce wheat. Bakers and consumers now had something far more expedient: a steady supply of white flour that made uniform loaves and the luxury to eat wheat as one
part
of the meal. Bread became a choice rather than the main source of caloric energy.

As a result, so many staple grains—buckwheat, barley, spelt, rye, einkorn, emmer, millet, and tens of thousands of landrace wheat varieties—that people consumed for centuries ended up in the modern world as little more than a curiosity; they eventually became specialty breads that only recently are making a comeback. These grains are grown on a very small scale today, with the vast majority of diverse varieties sitting in frozen gene banks as a repository for specialized grain breeders. Well, either there, or on the shelves of bakers like me.

 • • • 

W
hile bread is now consumed globally, the origin of the cereal grains is rather narrow.
Grasslands cover
about 40 percent of the earth’s surface, but the distant relatives of the wheat fruit we eat arose in the Fertile Crescent—an arc that runs from Israel, Jordan, and Syria through southern Turkey and into Iraq and western Iran.
Wild wheat and barley
along with grinding tools dating back 23,000 years were unearthed in a settlement on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. There were also signs of bread making at this site.
The oldest evidence
of grain consumption, though, appears about 105,000 years ago, from a cave in Mozambique in which sorghum residues were found on stone grinding tools. Nomads first began gathering these grains in the wild, though wild wheat kernels—the plant’s fruit—presented a challenge if they were to become food.

The brittle seed heads on which wild wheat forms—known as spikes or ears—naturally shatter when they mature, allowing the kernels to spread on the ground so that the plant can grow again. This was an evolutionary advantage for an annual like wheat but not a culinary one for humans. After the spike shattered, a person would need to scoop the grain up from the soil before it sprouted and spoiled. If you are a gardener, used to bending over a plot, you can appreciate why gatherers may have sought the grain before it shattered, or selected seeds from rare mutant plants with intact ears. If you happened to come across a chest-high wheat plant with mature grain attached to the stalk, you wouldn’t have to bend down and pick up tiny seeds on the ground. You could snap the stalk just below the ear, put the grains in an animal skin bag, and take them back to your settlement. You might even save some seed, planting it the following year. This was the beginning of the domestication of wild wheat.

Nonshattering wheat had another advantage absent in most wild wheats: it had a hull that split open, releasing the kernel when it was threshed.
This mutant trait
—known as “free-threshing wheat” and a clear sign of domestication—first appears in settlements dating back 9,500 years. Other ancient wheats and barleys that shattered in the field had tough hulls that had to be removed to get at the kernel inside, and removing the hull was tough work—the job of the
pistor
in Rome grinding away at spelt. So, the evolutionary mutation of free-threshing wheat meant less work. Curiously, the domestication of wheat wasn’t a straight line that favored these traits, and many hulled wheats were favored for centuries. Free-threshing wheat, for example,
evolved
before
hulled spelt
, which means that humans didn’t always view hulled grains as a disadvantage, perhaps because they liked the taste or had slaves to hull them.

These domesticated traits could be easily selected because wheat self-pollinates, with wheat pollen fertilizing the plant’s flower before it opens and blooms. That meant these early farmers could grow the varieties they wanted without worrying about nature mixing in inferior traits from other plants through cross-pollination. (Although wheat does cross-pollinate, it happens only rarely.) Nearly all the earliest crops at the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent were self-pollinators, which makes sense, because it allowed farmers to, in effect, design the plants they wanted. But this domestication process was messy, uneven, rather than appearing suddenly in a Neolithic “revolution,” as archeologists once imagined.

This is apparent in the domestication of wheat
, the first signs of which began around 10,500 years ago, according to studies of charred seed remains. Archeologists have realized that it took another millennium or so for various domesticated traits to become dominant. So what took so long? George Willcox, an archeobotanist at Archéorient, CNRS–Université Lumière in Lyon, France, and one of the principal researchers on these findings, suggests that crops failed repeatedly, forcing farmers to return to wild sites where they would gather new seeds. Or they would consume their entire grain supply, because food was in short supply.
Domestication accelerated only
once these farmers began to plant their crops farther away from wild wheat fields.

This process occurred at multiple locations
in the Fertile Crescent, with diverse grasses. In southeastern Turkey, Neolithic farmers gathered wild einkorn and emmer wheats, then cultivated it. In other settlements, rye and a type of buckwheat appear. Farther south, near present-day Jordan, emmer wheat was favored, and to the east, settlements sprang up in the fertile valleys along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, where emmer and barley were grown. Grain cultivation also sprang up to the west, in central Turkey and in Cyprus.

Something else happened as well. At a well-preserved
11,000-year-old Syrian site
known as Jerf el Ahmar, on the banks of the Euphrates River, archeologists identified sickle blades, grain storage vessels, saddle querns for grinding grain by hand, and ample remnants of wild barley and rye along with preserved mice droppings (perhaps providing a source of
Lactobacillus
). Even a kitchen was excavated with stone basins, a hearth, and three querns, which would allow people to grind grain side by side. At this site, wild grains and lentils, along with game, were the main sources of sustenance.

While archeologists long thought that the advent of farming caused hunters and gatherers to settle down, forming communities, villages, and eventually complex societies, this theory has recently been questioned, because long-standing sites have been located without any signs of agriculture. One gathering spot in southern Turkey, Göbekli Tepe, which dates back 11,600 years, has the world’s oldest known temple, with intricately carved pillars decorated with gazelles and wild boars, snakes and scorpions. The people who built this site had no pottery, for it hadn’t been invented, nor draft animals, for livestock had not been domesticated, yet they were able to move sixteen-ton rocks and might even have brewed wild grain beer in stone basins. They built the first known monuments in human history, practiced art and religion, perhaps while enjoying a wild einkorn wheat brew, but they still were hunting and foraging to feed themselves in massive gatherings.

The site remained important for more than two thousand years, maybe the Neolithic rave or Burning Man of its day. Eventually, archeologists speculate, these religious gatherings created a demand for food that could be met only by farming. Coincidentally, Göbekli Tepe is just sixty miles from the Karaca Dag mountain, where the closest wild ancestors of domesticated einkorn wheat are found. It is also near a site in Turkey where people began farming about 9,250 years ago—which coincides with the ascendance of Göbekli Tepe. Did this farming settlement twenty miles away provide food for the worshippers? Did the religious gathering create an impetus to begin farming? Perhaps the two developments—religion, farming—were related, or maybe not.
As Klaus Schmidt, the archeologist
who has been studying the site for two decades, told
National Geographic
magazine, less than 10 percent of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated. Who knows what future secrets remain buried?

The early farmers, unsurprisingly, planted crops that did well in their locale, since the temperature, amount of rainfall, and even soil type in the northern reaches of the Fertile Crescent differed from those in the south. They sowed grains near where the wild grasses grew, but also in areas that were free of them, which points to seed trading or sharing and human migration—the process that eventually took wheat into Europe and Asia. Along with ancient wheat, barley, and rye, these farmers grew flax, chickpeas, and lentils, as well as peas, fava beans, and bitter vetch. Goats soon joined the mix. Figs, pistachios, almonds, and grapes, which grew wild in the region, were domesticated, too. These crops were the earliest landraces, adapted to microhabitats, selected by farmers, and grown for generations. They were, to put a contemporary spin on it, local food, or maybe ultralocal, because their very existence was intertwined with the soil and climate in which they grew.

The wheat was also highly diverse, made up of many species, in contrast to the wheat we eat today. Einkorn wheat (
Triticum monococcum
), which is barely grown these days, has one of the simplest genomes among wheat, with just two sets of chromosomes (known as a diploid). Though it boasts more protein than modern bread wheat, it’s a low-yielding hulled wheat, which may explain why, after becoming established in southern Europe through medieval times, it fell out of favor. Recently, einkorn has had a minor renaissance among organic farmers, such as in France, where it is known as
petit épeautre
. You can find loaves made with einkorn in a few Paris
boulangeries
.