Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

by Michael Pollan

  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.

  Even as I struggled, though, I began to suspect that the conventional view that there is an inevitable trade-off between whole grains and great bread—a view accepted by everyone from the food scientists at Hostess to any number of gifted artisanal bakers—might not necessarily be true. More likely, we’d come to regard the trade-off as inevitable simply because it was so much easier to bake good white bread than whole grain. From any bag of white flour and packet of yeast in the supermarket it was possible to bake a sweet and impressively airy loaf of bread. This was the whole point and promise of white flour and commercial yeast: They were standardized commodities that behaved in predictable ways. But try to make whole-grain bread in a system that has been organized around white flour—using reconstituted whole-grain flour, fast-acting yeasts, white-flour recipes, dry doughs, etc.—and the bread will reliably disappoint: earthbound, crumbling, stingy with flavor. Yet another advertisement for white bread.

  To bake a truly great whole-grain loaf would take more than a good recipe. It would mean getting out from under the whole white-flour regime, as Dave Miller had done when he began working directly with farmers and milling their grain fresh. It would mean recognizing that whole-grain bread has a system of its own, or at least it once did, before the advent of the roller mill and commercial yeast and mechanized baking. That system was built around stone mills to grind wheat whole, access to fresh flour, natural leavens, tons of time, and a human culture, or body of knowledge, that understood how to manage the whole process and its numberless contingencies.

  If this already seems like too much to hope for, I could think of more. Ideally, a whole-grain regimen would offer varieties of wheat that had been bred for something other than a giant super-white endosperm and a hard coat of bran. And, also ideally, this wheat would figure in a much shorter food chain, one where local mills bought directly from nearby farmers so that bakers could get flour that has been freshly milled from the most desirable varieties of wheat.

  To view the problem this way is to despair of ever baking a truly great whole-grain bread. T
he white flour industrial complex so completely dominates the food landscape (including even the artisanal corner of that landscape) that to wish for anything substantially different seems, well, wishful and nostalgic. To bake the bread I wanted, I didn’t just need a better recipe. I needed a whole different civilization.

  But a couple of stray facts gave me just enough hope to keep on baking. The first came when I noticed that the price of Soft 100% Whole Wheat Wonder Bread at my local Safeway was $4.59—not cheap. How was it that Dave Miller could sell his incomparably more delicious and nourishing organic, freshly milled, long-fermented loaves at the farmers’ market for $5.00, only 41 cents more than Hostess charged? Perhaps the industrial bread system might not be as indomitable as it appears, at least when it came to meeting the demand for whole-grain bread. In the middle of an economy organized around white flour, whole-grain flour and all the technology required to make it acceptable to the consumer is expensive. The second encouraging fact was that several of the most gifted bakers in the Bay Area, including Chad Robertson at Tartine, Steve Sullivan at Acme, Craig Ponsford, and Mike Zakowski, were at work developing new whole-grain breads, many of them 100 percent whole grain. So something was in the air—the first stirrings, perhaps, of a cultural revival. Even the newsletter of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, which for years had been openly hostile to whole grain, was beginning to question the white-flour orthodoxy and to shine a flattering light on bakers, like Ponsford, who had rejected it.

  The last encouraging fact was scattered evidence that a local whole-grain economy might also be stirring here and there. New grain farmers and millers were popping up in New England and the Pacific Northwest and even in my own backyard, part of the national movement to supply a growing demand for local food. I talked to a wheat breeder in Washington State who was working to develop varieties better suited to whole-grain milling and baking. He mentioned that he had been in touch with new local grain projects all over the country.

  And then I heard about a new enterprise called Community Grains, based near me in Oakland, that had started selling stone-ground whole-wheat flour grown in California. I didn’t even know you could grow wheat in California. But it had apparently been an important crop in the nineteenth century, before the big irrigation projects, because it can be planted in the fall and then watered by the winter rains. Community Grains was selling wheat that was being grown by a group of farmers in the Sacramento Valley and milled in Woodland at a small company called Certified Foods.

  As soon as I heard about Community Grains, I knew there was one more field trip in my baking education. As a baker of white bread, I had had no need to make the acquaintance of a miller, much less a wheat farmer. Indeed, that was the great virtue of the white-flour economy: a baker could focus on bread and pretty much ignore the long and largely invisible food chain that delivered the white powder to his door. But to bake a great, or even a decent, loaf of whole-grain bread, I needed to know a little more about wheat and milling. And unless I was going to buy my own mill, I needed a source of good, fresh whole-wheat flour. So I made plans to travel to Woodland, to meet my wheat.

  I would not have guessed that Joe Vanderliet, the proprietor of Certified Foods and the miller for Community Grains, is in his eighties, he is so robust. Six feet three and unbent, he has a full head of gray hair, piercing blue eyes, and a sly sidelong twinkle about him. Joe grew up in the Netherlands, and recalls several hungry years as a boy during the war. He bears a trace of a Dutch accent, as well as a courtly Old World manner that leavens, slightly, his forceful personality. In the 1950s, Joe landed in Minnesota, and went to work as a grain buyer for Archer Daniels Midland. In the 1960s he worked for Montana Flour Mills Company, which was later absorbed by ConAgra during the consolidation of the milling industry during the sixties and seventies. Joe Vanderliet is very much a product of the white flour industrial complex.

  But in the 1980s he had his own conversion experience, a story that he has by now milled to a high degree of refinement. A miller from Australia visited the plant he ran for Montana Flour Mills Company in Oakland, a high-tech mill of which Vanderliet could not have been more proud. “We had it all, a pneumatic system for moving the flour, state of the art everything. But this fellow looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Have you ever thought about the nutritional value of this white flour you’re milling?’” Vanderliet hadn’t, but from that moment, “I could never leave the question alone.”

  “Personally, you understand, I was doing very well. I was happy. I had the most beautiful mill in the world. I was an officer of the company. I had the credit cards and the Brooks Brothers suits. But no one in the industry ever talked about nutrition. We were throwing the most nutritious part of our product in the garbage! The mill run [the discarded bran and germ] was going to the feedlot.

  “I came home at night to my wife and said, ‘What in God’s name are we selling? We are not selling nutrition. Just endosperm. If you could only see what we’re doing to the wheat. We’re selling garbage! This has got to stop.’

  “Well, that was thirty years ago. I’ve been milling whole grains ever since.”

  In 1992, Vanderliet gave up his comfortable perch in the milling industry to launch a start-up that would focus exclusively on whole grains. Today, Certified Foods operates one of the larger whole-grain mills in the country, in a sprawling warehouse building alongside the railroad tracks in Woodland. It took months of journalistic courtship before he would consent to let me visit; in fact, Certified’s mill proved harder to get into than the Wonder Bread factory. But eventually Joe relented, on the condition I agree to some “ground rules,” which he never actually specified. Vanderliet is extremely secretive about his milling methods and worried, or at least professed to be, that I would somehow spill the proprietary beans to the competition.

  He need not have worried. Only another miller could have toured his plant and understood the first thing about what was going on deep inside all those freshly painted tan steel contraptions. Since the millstones and rollers are encased in steel and the flour moves between them in sealed pneumatic tubes, just about every step in the milling process takes place out of sight. What seemed distinctive about Vanderliet’s operation is that the grain went through a multistep milling process that partakes of both traditional and modern technologies. So, after being milled whole on stone, the grain is passed through a roller mill and a hammer mill. (This is a chamber in which the grain is thrown against a rough surface to further refine it.) These extra steps allow Certified to produce a more finely granulated whole-grain flour than a stone mill alone could produce without overheating it. The extra steps may also increase the shelf life of the flour by sealing the volatile germ within a coat of starch—but this is only a theory. As we walked through the plant, Vanderliet explained over the pounding din what was in his view the most important feature of his milling: “We keep the whole seed intact throughout the entire process.

  “You cannot fractionate the seed without ruining the flour. As soon as you separate the bran from the germ, that’s it, it’s all over: The germ will turn rancid. Its nutrition will be lost. What you have to understand—write this down!—is that nature made a perfect package when it made the seed, all the parts working together in a living system. So, for example, there are antioxidant compounds in the bran that protect the oils in the germ from oxidizing. But only if they are kept together! Once you break apart the seed, you can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” He pointed at my notebook. “Write that down.”

  This was the key to good whole-grain flour. And this, according to Vanderliet, is the reason that the big mills can never produce it, since their roller mills separate the seed into
its component parts at the first break. Yet as soon as the germ is separated from its antioxidant protector, it begins to deteriorate. That’s why, according to Vanderliet, most big millers routinely leave out the germ when they reconstitute whole-grain flours. When I asked for proof of this claim—which if true means that most of what is sold as whole wheat is actually nothing of the kind—he brought me into the mill’s control room to meet Roger Bane, his chief engineer. Joe hired Roger away from General Mills, which until recently operated a mill in Vallejo. Roger confirmed Vanderliet’s claim: “The germ is too troublesome to deal with, so we just got rid of it.” That troublesome germ may constitute only a tiny fraction of the wheat seed, but happens to contain a whole suite of valuable nutrients—omega-3s, vitamin E, folic acid, and more—along with most of the flavor and aroma of wheat. (When I contacted General Mills for comment, I received an unsigned e-mail stating that “by law, whole wheat flour must contain all three parts of the wheat berry” and that while “it is true that the germ portion shortens the shelf life of the flour … it must be included, as it is in ours.”)