In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (20 page)

Emmer wheat (
Triticum dicoccum
) evolved from two wild grasses and has a slightly more complex genetic structure than einkorn, with four sets of chromosomes (known as a tetraploid). With barley, emmer became the dominant grain in these Neolithic settlements and also a staple in Egypt, where it was used in bread and beer making.
Along with einkorn, emmer
was grown in the first farming settlements in central Europe, dating back 6,500 years. It has a unique smoky flavor that adds an earthy note when blended with other flours. On its own, I find it a bit overpowering, though that may just be the variety I’m using. The genetic remnants of emmer can now be found in durum wheat (
Triticum
durum
), the primary high-protein wheat used in pasta making.

Bread wheat (
Triticum aestivum
), or what is commonly called “wheat,” is the most complex of all these grasses, with a genetic code that’s five times larger than the human genome. Bread wheat was the offspring of emmer wheat and a species of wild goat grass (
Aegilops squarrosa
), a spindly weed found in a wide-ranging area of the Near East. The genetic contribution of goat grass was especially important to wheat, because it was the origin of wheat’s gliadin proteins, which allow dough to stretch out without breaking. As a result, a
pizzaiola
can throw a thin disk of dough into the air, letting it expand without ripping apart. But a segment within gliadin can also trigger the potent and potentially fatal celiac disease.

Since wild emmer doesn’t naturally grow near populations of wild goat grass, a chance hybridization likely occurred once domesticated emmer moved eastward with human cultivation, near the southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea. Once the two mated, the result was a hexaploid wheat with six sets of chromosomes—four from emmer, two from goat grass. Since the wild population of goat grass ranges northeast of the Fertile Crescent, bread wheat spread in an area north of Iran, stretching from Armenia to the western Caspian Sea. These wheats proved far more adaptable than their wild progenitors, and were able to survive the cold winters of northern Europe and the humid summers of Asia. So they spread, first into Georgia, and then into the Ukrainian and Russian steppe—the vast grasslands that extend as far as Siberia. Bread wheat also moved from Iran into Afghanistan, eventually becoming a staple in India, and then migrating to China. It now accounts for
95 percent of all wheat
grown today, with durum making up the remaining 5 percent.

Ancient wheats, now relics, are cultivated on a very small scale, though they are having a culinary resurgence. Spelt (
Triticum aestivum
var.
spelta)
is one of them, known by Romans as
far
in Latin, hence
farina
, meaning flour. Spelt has a sweet, robust flavor that I find superior to whole wheat flour, which is why I suggest blending in a bit of it for those beginning to bake with whole grain flours. While some believe that gluten-sensitive people can tolerate spelt because it’s “not wheat,” be wary. Spelt is a subspecies of bread wheat. It does contain gluten and some varieties have been hybridized, that is,
crossbred with other nonspelt
wheat varieties, to improve baking quality.

When considered as a whole, the wild grasses that produced these domesticated wheats had a great deal of diversity. But even so, farmers had to choose what diverse traits they wanted and which seeds would be saved. Given this annual practice of selecting and propagating seeds—this one doesn’t shatter, that one is bigger, these did well during last year’s drought, this one makes better beer or bread—it’s no wonder that the story of wheat breeding reads like the biblical passages of who begat whom, from the earliest wild wheat to the most modern varieties. It’s one long lineage of seed selected, saved, bred, and passed on until the oldest, original varieties were largely lost to time. Now,
if a major portion of the wheat crop
perishes—a not unreasonable fear, given the periodic outbreak of virulent wheat diseases—humanity will find itself short of food. If humanity perishes, domesticated wheat will disappear and be overtaken by wild grasses with ears that once again shatter. Plants never stand still—a fact that became clear when I began to look into one of the “heritage” wheats that created the breadbasket of the Great Plains, which is where I’ll turn in the following chapter.

 • • • 

W
hile writing about the origins of wheat in the Fertile Crescent, I serendipitously got an e-mail from Mary-Howell Martens offering to send me some of the ancient wheat she and her husband, Klaas, grow at Lakeview Organic Grain in New York. I have known the Martenses for many years, and was aware of their work, but had never tried their grains. So I made arrangements for a friend to pick up the samples at a farming conference the Martenses were attending in Pennsylvania.

When I received the delivery, I couldn’t quite believe my good luck. There were bags of whole hull-less oats, spelt, emmer wheat, a red winter wheat, a beautiful white wheat, a variety of heritage corn known as Wapsie Valley, and smoked spelt (freekeh). They sat around in mason jars for a while, a bit intimidating, but then I went to work and ground the emmer wheat with a countertop stone mill.

I made a simple flatbread, without any leavening, using the method that Jeffrey Hamelman had taught. It can hardly be called a recipe because it simply contains flour, oil, water, and salt. I let the dough sit for several hours, then rolled it out and cooked it on a cast-iron griddle. Then I moved it directly onto the flame. After charring it a bit here and there, I spread a little butter on it—and ate it with lentils and a salad. With a glass of beer, I toasted my Neolithic ancestors.

(
EASY
)

Makes 12 flatbreads

The hardest part about this recipe is getting hold of emmer flour, which is pretty rare and can be pricey. But if you do find it, dive in. I tried this recipe with 100 percent emmer flour, but found the taste too assertive, so I mixed it with an equal portion of whole wheat flour. (If you want a milder version, mix the emmer with white flour, but cut back on the water slightly.) Although the recipe calls for the dough to sit for as long as 8 hours, you can use it far sooner, though the flecks of bran may be more noticeable.

Tools

Bowl

Plastic wrap

Plastic dough scraper

10-inch cast-iron skillet

Rolling pin

Spatula (optional)

Flatbread Ingredients

200 grams whole wheat flour, plus more for the work surface

200 grams emmer wheat flour (if unavailable, use whole wheat)

265 grams water

2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil, plus more for the bowl

7 grams salt

Morning

Combine the flours, water, oil, and salt in a bowl until they come together into a mass. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 20 to 30 minutes while the flour absorbs the water.

Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and knead for about 5 minutes by pushing down on and spreading the dough and then folding it over on itself. It should be smooth and elastic. Form it into a ball and place it in a clean, oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let the dough rest for 4 to 8 hours.

Afternoon or Evening

About 45 minutes before you want to bake, spread out the dough on a lightly floured counter, cut the dough in half with a dough scraper, and roll it into 2 logs. Cut each log into 6 pieces. You should have 12 pieces of dough that weigh about 55 grams each; evenly distribute any leftover dough.

Shape each piece into a ball. Let the balls rest for 30 minutes at room temperature under plastic wrap.

Place a cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat and let it heat up for several minutes.

Mean while, liberally flour a work surface. Flatten a dough ball and dust it lightly with flour, then use a floured rolling pin to roll it out as thin as possible (7 to 9 inches in diameter), rotating the disk to keep it even. If it resists, let it rest for a few minutes and continue rolling again. Cover the disk with a towel. Repeat with the remaining dough.

When the skillet starts smoking, gently lift a disk of dough. Place it in the skillet, cook it for about 30 seconds, and then turn it over with your fingers or a spatula for another 30 seconds. Remove the skillet from the flame and, holding the flatbread by its edge, put it directly on the fire. Keep moving it in a circle so that it doesn’t burn, then turn over and repeat. The bread should be blistered and dark in spots.

Remove the flatbread and cover it with a towel or aluminum foil to keep it from forming a crust. (Dot it with butter and fold it in half if you like.) Repeat with the remaining disks of dough. Serve warm. These can be made in advance and stored in a resealable plastic container on the counter for a couple of days. But they are best eaten fresh.

(
EASY
)

Makes 4 pancakes

I first made
socca
—a chickpea flatbread eaten in southern France—in the wood-fired oven class with Hamelman. We poured the liquid chickpea batter into a preheated metal pan that had been doused with a good deal of olive oil and thrust it back into the oven. It was done in a few minutes, and we cut it up and scarfed it down.

The second time I came across
socca
was in David Lebovitz’s
The Sweet Life in Paris
. I had great success cooking it right under the broiler in a cast-iron pan. For this version, I tweaked the recipe in a nod to the Americas, and added just a bit of cornmeal. Now, my French friends may be rolling their eyes, but it does add a sweet flavor to the chickpea flour. This batter is very liquid, so don’t try to thicken it up. Make sure you let it rest for a couple of hours (even overnight in the refrigerator) so that the legume and corn flours really hydrate. You can cook it under the broiler, but I also got stellar results just heating up a cast-iron pan on the stove, swirling around olive oil until it’s just starting to smoke, then pouring in the batter. I cooked it until brown on one side, which takes about 2 minutes, then flipped it over for another minute. Maybe it’s just a chickpea-corn pancake.

Tools

Bowl

10-inch cast-iron pan

Spatula

Cutting board

Flatbread Ingredients

160 grams chickpea flour

40 grams fine cornmeal or corn flour

430 grams water

3 grams salt

¹
/
₄
teaspoon ground cumin

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Mix together the flours, water, salt, cumin, and 3 tablespoons of the olive oil. Let the batter rest for at least 2 hours, covered, at room temperature, or overnight in the refrigerator.

Heat the cast-iron pan on a high flame, drizzling in the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil, so that it covers the whole surface. Just as it begins to smoke, pour in enough batter to fill the pan. Swirl the batter so it fills the pan to the edges, and turn down the flame to medium.

After 2 minutes check the underside with a spatula to see if it’s brown. When it is, carefully flip the
socca
over and cook the remaining side for about 1 minute.

Slide the
socca
onto a cutting board, drizzle with high-quality extra virgin olive oil, and cut it into 4 or 8 pieces. Eat immediately.

R
ewind to 1912
: A fifteen-year-old Kansas boy named Earl Clark noticed a plant with unusual black wheat kernels on his family’s farm, so he saved three of these seeds and kept them to plant again. Clark, who went on to become a renowned wheat breeder in Sedgwick, Kansas, found that these seeds matured more quickly and produced a bountiful crop, so he continued to propagate them. Named Blackhull, the variety spread, accounting for a third of the Kansas wheat crop by the 1930s. Clark went on to breed eleven new varieties, such as Red Chief, which was more erect and vigorous than Blackhull and thrived in poor soil. It became a popular variety in southern Kansas in 1944. Clark then crossed Red Chief with another variety from which a single plant was selected—KanKing—found growing amid weeds. Released to farmers in 1952, KanKing was then crossed back with another offspring of Red Chief. Their progeny, a white wheat selected over eight generations, was released as Clark’s Cream in 1972. White wheat has a milder flavor than more common red wheat, because it lacks the dark pigments in its bran. It is primarily exported to Asia, where its light color is favored by noodle makers. Clark’s Cream also became popular with Kansas wheat farmers who still plant it today. I have a bag of the flour sitting on my kitchen shelf and I blend it with freshly milled corn flour and spelt to make a marvelous sourdough waffle. I normally wouldn’t think twice about it—it’s just “white wheat,” after all—yet its lineage can be traced all the way back through a dozen selections to black-hulled seeds plucked from a Kansas field by an observant teenager a century ago. One plant, one field, one kid, in the most important wheat-growing region of the country, all the way to my waffles.

When I talked about Clark with Mark Nightengale, the manager of a farmer-owned flour milling company in western Kansas called Heartland Mill, he told me that he had tried to grow all of Clark’s varieties on his family’s 3,000-acre farm. But they could not yield as much grain as modern wheat varieties nor tolerate intensive mixing—the giant mixers that make today’s soft, pan-loaf breads. As a result, many of these once-dominant varieties had fallen out of favor by the 1950s, as industrial bakers sought out higher-gluten wheat that could withstand industrial fabrication. The only one of Clark’s varieties that Heartland still milled was Clark’s Cream, which is where I bought the flour.

As I grew more curious about the wheat I baked with, I began to look more closely at its origins—first, in the ancient grains of the Fertile Crescent, and then with the more recent varieties that came from the Great Plains. I wanted to get beyond the façade of “flour,” which makes one bag seemingly indistinguishable from the next and obscures the plants and seeds that create this staple. The more I looked, the more fascinating this story became. As wheat breeds evolved, what had been left behind? What tastes and attributes were lost in this headlong push to the wheat we eat today? And what was gained?

As it turned out, Clark had plucked that black-hulled grain from
a field of Turkey Red wheat
, a diverse landrace population grown in Ukraine. This seed came to Kansas with Ukrainian Mennonite immigrants who arrived in 1873, fleeing religious persecution and lured by the prospect of farmland from the Santa Fe Railroad Co. The railroads at that time were laying tracks across the Great Plains, settling farmers and transporting grain to the nascent commodity markets of Chicago, which swallowed it up and then shipped it out to New York, Philadelphia, and Europe. These
farmers settling the Great Plains
were never “local” in the way that we understand the term today: their very presence in the latter half of the nineteenth century was made possible by railroads, grain traders, markets, and millers. Turkey Red wheat became prevalent in this locale because the Ukrainian steppe matched the climate and soil of Kansas and the immigrant farmers who brought it in sacks had the knowledge to sow it.

This was hard red winter wheat, which was relatively rare in the region before the Ukrainian Mennonites settled there. It became the early foundation for much of the wheat grown in Kansas to this day. Hard red winter wheat is particularly important for artisan bakers because it has protein levels in the range of 10.5 to 12 percent and is suited to gentle fabrication, such as hand shaping. Home bakers should seek it out as well. This isn’t too difficult, since many “all purpose” flours are milled from it.

What makes this wheat “hard” is a relatively high percentage of protein, which is necessary to raise a loaf of bread (one old method of testing the grain was to chew on the wheat kernel to see how “hard” it was). The phenolic compounds in the bran, which appear brown or dark red in color, give whole wheat flour its slightly bitter and nutty flavor. It’s known as a “winter wheat” because the crop is sown in the fall, then undergoes a period of vernalization, when prolonged exposure to cold temperatures causes the plant to go dormant. In the early spring, when the days grow longer and the temperature warms up, the plant’s reproductive stage is triggered. It resumes growing, then blossoms and bears its fruit, the wheat kernel. Once the seed dries on the stalk, usually in the late spring or early summer, the harvest begins.

Turkey Red wasn’t the only wheat grown in the Great Plains in the nineteenth century. Another variety, Red Fife, was dominant in the northern plains. It was thought to have originated in Danzig, Poland, and was shipped via Glasgow to a Scottish farmer in Ontario, David Fife.
He and his wife, Jane
, were reputed to have bred out the seeds of a single plant grown on their farm in 1842 (in contrast to Turkey Red, which consisted of a diverse landrace population). It was the first hard spring wheat grown in North America. Unlike winter wheat which is sown in the fall, spring wheat is planted as soon as the soil is dry enough in the spring and grows continuously until harvest. Since it doesn’t need a period of dormancy, it was suited for the northern plains where the winters are often too harsh for fall-sown grasses. It also produces a much higher-protein flour of around 14 to 16 percent that creates terrifically strong gluten, suitable for bagels, high-volume pan breads, and intensive mixing machines in industrial bakeries. Although Red Fife became a relic, it has recently been revived by Canadian farmers and currently has something of a cult status among artisan bakers, even more so than Turkey Red.

Unlike the northern plains, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas were better suited to growing winter wheat varieties. So here, Turkey Red supplanted the wheat varieties that early settlers brought with them from the humid East, which didn’t adapt well to the plains. Since Turkey Red matured early, it could be harvested before devastating fungal rusts appeared in the summer, which could wipe out spring wheats. Still, it took nearly three decades after its introduction to spread widely. Since much of the seed came from immigrants, there wasn’t a sufficient supply. Mills accustomed to softer, or low-protein, wheat only bought Turkey Red at a discount because it was much more difficult to grind. It wasn’t until milling technologies advanced—with roller mills—that Turkey Red took off, helped along by the newly constructed rail networks and a burgeoning global grain market. By the early twentieth century,
when Turkey Red was near its peak
, it had supplanted all previous varieties. At this time, less than 8 percent of the nation’s wheat varieties could be traced back to the 1840s. By 1919, Turkey Red represented 99 percent of the winter wheat crop in the United States and remained dominant until 1944, when it was overtaken by higher-yielding varieties.

From our vantage point, Turkey Red is an extremely rare heritage wheat, cherished because of its taste, story, and small-scale cultivation. But at its height, it was the modern wheat of its day and had actually supplanted earlier eastern varieties, many of which are now lost to time.

 • • • 

L
earning this history, I knew I had to visit Heartland Mill, so one crisp fall day I flew into Denver International Airport, then drove east in a rented gray minivan. I had been to Denver dozens of times, but I had always driven toward the Rocky Mountains, never away from them.

Interstate 70 was a straight arrow out of Denver, with slight curves and subtle hills. As I entered the plains, rangeland and crop fields rolled on for miles, broken up only by the occasional gas station–mini-mart, fast-food restaurant, or chain motel. In one small dusty location, I spent the night at a motor lodge with a neon sign, where I was greeted by a woman in a sari and the rich smell of Indian food wafting out of the office kitchen.

Early the next day, I got back on the highway and continued heading east, into the rising sun. I was nervous about my whereabouts, but with acres upon acres of grassland and a straight road as far as one could see, there weren’t many options. I plowed ahead. Eventually, I exited the highway and took a right, heading due south on a two-lane road cutting through a region recently planted with winter wheat. The clouds parted in the distance—the light shining in a kind of “Hallelujah!” moment—so I stopped and got out of the van to snap a picture. The only sound I heard was the wind sweeping across the vast grasslands.

A few hours later, I rolled into Marienthal, Kansas. It wasn’t so much a town but a collection of buildings: a tall grain elevator, a few small wood-frame houses, and the slapdash buildings that housed Heartland Mill, all positioned around the railroad track that ran east–west.

Mark Nightengale, a robust man with a firm handshake, greeted me in the kitchen of the small white wooden house that serves as the company office. We sat down at a table, and over coffee, he told me the story of how his grandparents fled Ukraine for Kansas. In his telling, I could see the
culture
in agriculture, for his family’s story was also the story of Turkey Red wheat, the rise of the breadbasket, the settling of the plains, and the growing of wheat for a hungry nation.