Compiling this list scares me a bit, because it looks like a full-blown hoarding disorder, but that is not unusual when you get the bread-making bug. For professional bakers who need to produce a full line of breads every day, this wide variety of grains, and their variable performance, would be a curse. If there’s one thing professional bakers need, it’s consistency—that is, being able to reproduce the same bread time and again to the same high standards because that’s what their customers expect. That’s the bane of home bakers, whose results are so often inconsistent. The crust might be too hard one day, the interior too dense another. At times, you might get a marvelous flavor but the loaf will be compact. At other times, you’ll get good loft and an airy light crumb, but there’ll be an absence of flavor. Yet without this requirement for consistency, home bakers get something in return: the ability to experiment, to do a lot of R&D. For me, that’s more fun, because it’s in the trying, in playing around, that you arrive at something new. It might even be the result of a simple mistake, and then if you do nail it, well, hopefully you remembered all the steps. Then you can reproduce it, maybe even with some consistency.
• • •
There’s an impulse, when baking with a range of flours, to make the types of bread that we’re familiar with, because you can simply swap out one flour for another. But that can set you up for failure because flours often perform differently. One simple way to try a variety of flours, though, is to begin at the beginning, which I got a taste of when I took a class with baker Jeffrey Hamelman in the small town of Norwich, Vermont.
Now, I’ve tended to avoid classes, mostly because they involve travel and can be costly. I’m content to try to work on breads by myself, or to talk my way into a bakery. But this class, held at King Arthur Flour, where Hamelman runs the baking department, caught my eye because it focused on wood-fired ovens. And it was during this class that I had a surprising epiphany related to all those diverse grains in my cabinet. It could be reduced to one word: simplicity.
The first thing we baked in the class was a flatbread, which had four ingredients: whole wheat flour, water, a bit of oil and salt, and no leavening. Hamelman had mixed up the dough several hours earlier and then let it sit, so that the whole wheat could fully hydrate. He then had us slice off small portions and roll them into balls. After they rested for a half hour, we flattened them into thin eight-inch disks, and folded the dough around a spicy tomato sauce Hamelman had whipped up with feta cheese and herbs. Then the fun began. We took giant wooden peels and slid the stuffed flatbreads into the hot, wood-fired oven, which was sheathed in stone and about eight feet deep. The heat emanating from the oven was enormous: my flatbread puffed up in about thirty seconds. After a minute I flipped it to darken the underside and then removed it to a piece of aluminum foil, wrapping it to keep the crust soft. The aroma in the classroom was intoxicating. Some students tore into their flatbreads before they were even cool enough to handle. I gave mine five minutes to cool down and then devoured it. It was among the best I’ve eaten.
Flatbreads were probably among the earliest breads, since all you need to do is grind grain and add water. Porridge was easier, no doubt, if you had a vessel to cook it in, but if you combined flour and water and simply flattened the dough in your hands and cooked it on a hot stone, it wouldn’t be too far removed from the kind of bread I was eating that day with Hamelman. In fact, if you want to explore the flavor of a grain, this is one of the best ways to do it. At home, in the absence of a wood oven, I bake flatbread in a cast-iron skillet, then toast it directly over the flames, inspired by the simplicity of a master baker.
• • •
When you think about it, the diversity of my grain pantry—which I bought at the supermarket, by mail order, and from farmers—is pretty unusual in the roughly twenty thousand years that humanity has been eating cereals. If you go back, way before packaged flour was sold in supermarkets, and before the global grain trade, people had very little choice about the grains they ate. Instead, they ate what was grown nearby—and whatever was available at harvest time. It might have been wheat. It might have been barley. Or it might have been nothing at all, if the harvest failed.
These grains were propagated and culled by generations of farmers, chosen because they grew well in the soil and climate. Maybe they survived drought, thrived during pest infestations, or stood tall while a fungal rust disease decimated the rest of a crop, making them candidates to be saved and replanted the following year. Given the variety of challenges these premodern farmers faced, they were always looking for the best varieties and hedging their bets. When one grain variety failed, another might make it. So they were careful to plant a diverse population of seeds, or what are known as “landraces.” These weren’t the monocultures of today, where a single variety of wheat might dominate a state, or even a nation. Landraces consist of subtly different varieties, which would also vary from one place to another. These cereals were the primary source of food once agriculture took hold, when people were eating two to four pounds of bread a day, with every meal, amounting to 80 percent of their diet. For these farmers, diversity wasn’t the huge bounty of choice in my kitchen cabinet. Diversity was an insurance policy, and thus civilization’s, for it meant at least some grain might make it to fill empty bellies from one harvest to the next.
The flours in my cabinet
Diverse seeds not only defined what the farm looked like, they also determined the bread, because the baker had to work with grains of varying quality. The result was a surprising variation not only in what was produced but also in what was done to stretch calories. If there wasn’t enough wheat, which was the de facto case, bakers turned to fast-growing buckwheat, cold-tolerant rye, or high-protein millet. They ate cakes made from oats and barley, as in Scotland, since both grains were especially hardy in northern Europe. Or they mixed coarse bran into rye—so-called horse bread eaten when food was scarce. They added walnuts and acorns and spent grains from the brewery to stretch the loaf out. Chickpeas were ground up, as with socca flatbread, in southern France, where the thin batter is baked on a dome-shaped griddle, or with farinata, as it is known in Liguria. In Cyprus, fermented chickpeas became a foundation for wheat and barley loaves, and in ancient Rome, the flour from ground fava beans was made into a bread known as panis lomentus. Bakers might grind chestnuts into flour, as in Sardinia, when wheat shipments were interrupted. Later, a New World starch, the potato, became a major buffer against famine in eighteenth-century Europe as the population exploded. Maize or corn served this purpose as well, baked into the dense Portuguese broa de milho, which is made with rye. Corn-rye also proved crucial to the early American settlers, where it was known as “rye-injun bread,” because wheat grew poorly in the southern New England climate.
But no matter where grain was grown, if scarcity struck, people moved down the ladder of preference from refined flours to breads made with whole grains and then bran. Starvation was a constant motivator, as in Venice in 1585, when bakers resorted to chestnut and bean flours. Or in Sweden, when rye nödbröd (“emergency bread”) was made with lily roots, Icelandic moss, and rowan berries. When hunger beckoned, grape seeds, pine bark, clay, and often straw was mixed into dough, though the use of ground bones was likely a myth. Nothing was wasted. Stale bread was remilled and mixed into new loaves or made into porridges or puddings, or simply eaten, for descriptions exist of giant whole grain breads lasting six months or more.
The very concept of “stale bread” might have been unknown, given that famines occurred at regular intervals. Thousands struck Europe between 1400 and 1700. In seventeenth-century France, five famines struck in the course of fifty years—about once every decade—and bread prices shot up tenfold. The famines continued into the eighteenth century. More recently, in Russia, four million to seven million people starved to death in 1933–34, just a decade after nine million perished from starvation. Indeed, grain shortages have been the rule in history, which could lead one to conclude that
grain diversity, while a good measure, wasn’t obviously enough of an insurance policy to maintain a food supply. People ate whatever they could and hoped for a successful harvest the next season—that is, if they weren’t forced to eat their store of seed, too.
Taste no doubt was a part of the equation, because some of these expedient choices became favored ones, defining a region’s bread. But choice wasn’t the driving force, subsistence was. These days, coming across a panoply of breads in an upscale specialty grocery store like Dean & DeLuca in Manhattan, the choice is almost daunting, from the darkest and hardiest Scandinavian ryes to sourdough French breads or their airy Italian cousins. While a link might be made between these breads and a particular country, the long-ago impetus to bake a loaf a particular way, to make it into food, has largely been forgotten. It was heavily determined by what was available, who could afford it, and what would prevent starvation lurking just over the horizon.
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.
• • •
Despite 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, pistors 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.
White and spelt flours, with flaxseeds
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 become
s 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.
In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey Page 13