In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey

by Fromartz, Samuel

  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.

  • • •

  If 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.

  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.

  • • •

  While 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 cultiv
ated 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.

  From left: freekeh, rye, red winter wheat, spelt

  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.

  White and emmer flour loaf

  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 w
ill 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.

  • • •

  While 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.