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

by Fromartz, Samuel

  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.

  Emmer Flatbread

  (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.

  Socca Américain

  (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.

  CHAPTER 5

  Turkey Red: Heritage Grains and the Roots of the Breadbasket

  Rewind 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 g
rain 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.

  Kansas cropland

  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.

  • • •

  Learning 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.

  Marienthal, Kansas

  While Nightengale went on—regaling me with details about cousins in Germany, where the Mennonites originated; tales of starvation on the Ukrainian steppe; and wheat and religion and the promise of a new land—I mentioned in passing that my father’s family, the Fromartzes, had hailed from Kiev, which is also in Ukraine. They were Jewi
sh immigrants who ended up in Brooklyn. Nightengale perked up at this. It was as if a bond had been forged right there over the kitchen table. He focused his steely eyes on me, one religiously persecuted immigrant offspring to another, and I knew right then this trip would be worth it.

  His grandfather broke sod with a steam engine and plow, then planted a quarter section, or 250 acres, with Turkey Red wheat. Three generations on, the farm had expanded to nearly 3,000 acres, and had followed the wave of modern agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and whatever new wheat breed was released, planting wheat year after year. By the 1980s, though, the conventional regime was taking a toll, in compacted soil that couldn’t hold water, in stunted plants, and in the need for ever more external nutrients because the soil was being mined. The crop was sold into the commodities market, which meant “we’d take the grain to the feedlots and they’d feed it to livestock, or it would get exported,” he said. Farmers were under pressure from rising debt, sour land deals, and big equipment purchases. Then grain prices plunged in the early 1980s. A huge number of farmers left the land.

  “You need to remember, in the late nineteenth century in western Kansas, there were more people living here than there are today,” he said. Nightengale responded by returning to farming the way his grandparents did, rotating crops, seeking out manure and compost to rebuild the depleted topsoil. He avoided chemicals. It was cheaper, after all, and the stuff was toxic. By the late 1980s, these practices began to pay off in higher grain weights and better grain quality, but Nightengale said the wheat wasn’t reaping anything extra in the commodities market. So Nightengale and several other farmers following a similar path started to peddle their grain at natural foods trade shows, where buyers had begun to ask about organic whole grain flour. Seeing an opportunity, the farmers, who were nearly organic already, decided to start a flour mill. Nightengale told me they thought it might be a way to keep young people—their kids—from leaving the area.