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

by Fromartz, Samuel

  PHOTOGRAPH BY LOGAN MOCK-BUNTING © WRIGHTSVILLE IMAGES, LLC

  Heinz Thomet on his tractor

  Seeing this work, it was obvious why this produce was not cheap. Perhaps it was also the reason grains looked promising, since they could be harvested with a tractor. As Heinz ramped up this effort, I kept abreast of his work and planned on visiting his farm during the fall season when he would be sowing wheat, barley, and rye.

  “Well, we need about three weeks of dry weather before I can get onto the ground,” he said, when I called him one day in October.

  “I know, but just give me a heads-up before you do it.”

  “Well, there’s not a lot to see. It’s not like it’s a Brueghel painting or anything. I’m on a tractor.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I still want to see it.”

  One warm day in late October, when planting was finally auspicious, I visited Next Step Produce. The small farm is beyond the suburban sprawl of Washington and it’s not particularly evident that such a bucolic spot—Brueghel painting or not—would sit a quarter mile or so off the main highway. The farm had several fields, all sloping down toward the forest and marshland that is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. When I arrived, Heinz’s wife, Gabrielle Lajoie—who is French Canadian and started out as an employee on the farm—came out of the house and said hello. His three young girls were climbing on the tractor, and before long, Heinz, in his well-worn work clothes, scraggly beard, and bushy hair, which looked a bit like broccoli rabe, showed up. He was tall and solidly built, perhaps the most husky vegan I’ve met. After shaking my hand, Heinz took me to see the operation.

  The business was more complicated than just growing wheat, because the kernels had to be cleaned. Heinz had bought a range of blowers, shakers, and sieves to remove damaged grains, weeds, rocks, and dirt that might find their way into the bags destined for market. It’s hard to appreciate what’s involved when you buy those bags of pristine farro that are now so popular, until you compare freshly harvested grain with the final result. It was quite remarkable what this equipment, much of it new to his farm, could achieve in removing detritus. When he first started growing grain a few years back, Heinz gave me some rye but it wasn’t pure. Weedy legume seeds were mixed in with it, too, so I spent what seemed like an hour sorting the tiny, black, round peas from the greenish rye grains before I just gave up. I couldn’t clearly identify the other seed but figured it couldn’t be all that bad—so I just ground it all into flour and made rye bread. Now, he had advanced, and had all the specialized equipment to address such impurities, and a walk-in refrigerator, too, to prevent bugs from infesting the stored bags of grain. The setup was impressive, especially for the scale of the small farm.

  Aside from his reputation among farmers for being an extremely hard worker and tough boss, Heinz also let no opportunity for idle labor to pass, so, as we were talking, he pulled out a bag with a small amount of seed and asked if I might count the number of seeds it contained. Apparently, this was necessary to gauge the number of seeds in an ounce, and ultimately in an entire seed bag, so that he could figure out how many bags he needed to sow his fields that day.

  “Of course,” I said, rather naively. So, sitting at a small table in the barn, I used a knife to gently push wheat kernels into piles of ten, then added ten together to make one hundred, and so on. At one point, Gabrielle came out to the barn and smiled. “Oh, I see Heinz has you counting seeds.” After about a half hour, I had counted more than three thousand seeds. Heinz then ripped open the appropriate number of seed bags, emptied them into the seeder attached to the tractor, and off we went to the fields.

  It was a good day for sowing wheat but he was right: there wasn’t a lot to see, other than the tractor riding back and forth over the soil depositing seed in furrows. It took a couple of hours to complete the job. One of his daughters came along for the ride and sat in his lap on the tractor, then eventually jumped down and wandered over to a patch of grass where she watched her father ride back and forth over the fields. She picked a wildflower. I joined her in the warm afternoon sun and watched Heinz, too.

  • • •

  When he began this pursuit, one problem that he ran into quickly was finding wheat varieties suited to southern Maryland. Hardly any wheat was being grown in this part of the country, so it wasn’t as if he could turn to neighboring farmers for advice. He scoured the Internet looking for seed stock, and talked to other farmers in different regions of the country about what might work in the mid-Atlantic. But all of this was largely an experiment, since wheat growing on the Eastern Seaboard is relatively rare. Even now, with the locavore movement in full swing, it’s still confined to small pockets.

  To find the epicenter of the nation’s wheat production east of the Allegheny Mountains, the clock needs to be turned back to the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, the Shenandoah Valley, that fertile finger of land in Virginia about three hours west of Heinz’s farm, had served as the granary for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The valley is still fertile, but you won’t find much wheat there today. By the close of the nineteenth century, wheat production had shifted a thousand miles west, to Kansas, Texas, and Nebraska. The softer, lower-protein wheats once grown in the East fell out of favor, supplanted by the hard red wheats of the plains states that became the standard for bread making. It became conventional wisdom that bread wheat could not be grown on the Eastern Seaboard.

  Heinz, though, was curious, and wanted to give wheat a try, so he experimented with a few modern varieties, as well as Turkey Red. I passed him some wheat seed that Eli Rogosa had given me up in Massachusetts, which came from biodynamic farmers in Germany. I thought that it might be suited to his farm because Heinz used biodynamic farming methods, too. Since there were only about one hundred seeds in the packet, he would have to grow them out and then plant them again the following year, increasing the amount of seed annually before he had enough to sell.

  Heinz grew winter wheats—those varieties planted in the fall for harvest the next summer. He also planted spring wheats, but took the unusual step of sowing them in the fall because in the mid-Atlantic they could survive the mild winters and might mature more quickly. “It was something we used to do in Switzerland,” he said. It seemed as if Heinz would do anything to get a wheat crop.

  All the varieties he planted originated in the Great Plains, where the climate was dryer and cooler than Maryland. He didn’t have much choice, however, because all the wheat breeding programs until very recently were centered on the nation’s breadbasket, with a smattering in other regions. Stephen Jones, a professor at Washington State University, is one of the few wheat breeders developing local varieties. “I remember when I began looking into local breeds about ten or fifteen years ago, I got a comment on a grant application, ‘There is no interest in local wheat and there won’t be,’” he told me. This was not unusual; the work was unprecedented.

  Heather Darby, another agronomist at the University of Vermont, was aware that some farmers were growing wheat in Vermont and around 2006 began testing varieties that might be appropriate for the region. Nearly all were from the Dakotas, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and Quebec, though she did find an heirloom variety that had thrived in Vermont a century ago, known as Champlain. It proved highly productive, though not all heritage wheats ranked as high. “Just because they’re old doesn’t mean they’ll do well,” Darby said. With another agronomist in Maine, she found more varieties; then, with Jones’s guidance, she began to breed wheat suited to northern New England. When I asked Darby when was the last time a wheat variety had been bred in Vermont, she said: “1870.”

  While it was novel, maybe even foolhardy, to grow wheat in the East, it clearly wasn’t impossible. And it wasn’t just farmers in Vermont who were doing so, but others in western Massachusetts. Bakers such as Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton, Massachusetts, were enthusiastically using the flour. In the town of Skowhegan, Maine, I toured the Somerset Grist Mill, which opened
in 2012 in a former jail and sold stone ground flour under the Maine Grains label. In Asheville, North Carolina, I visited Carolina Ground, a multipronged affair run by a former baker, Jennifer Lapidus, which brought together farmers, a new stone mill, and a coterie of local bakers. Through Thom Leonard, the baker who had first championed Turkey Red wheat in Kansas, I learned that the same variety being grown in North Carolina was quite good. In northern California, Community Grains had launched a local grains effort with the help of Craig Ponsford, a superlative baker in San Rafael who sent me on my way with a five-pound bag of their whole wheat flour. In Portland, Oregon, bakers were using Shepard’s Grain flour, which came from a grain farmers’ co-op in the central part of the state. In New York, chefs and bakers were buying 65,000 pounds of local flour a month through the Greenmarket farmers’ markets. And then there was Anson Mills, in South Carolina, championing heritage grains grown by farmers around the country.

  But even with all this activity—and there were many more efforts, from Arizona to Washington State—local grains were just beginning to break out on the food scene. The movement made a lot of sense for artisan bakers, who had been troubled by the spikes in global food prices in 2007. They wanted a direct connection with farmers, not one mediated by the gyrating grain markets, commodity index funds, and Big Food. But the knowledge of what might be accomplished, especially in the East, was largely a blank slate, because it had been so long since wheat of any consequence had been grown here.

  Now, Heinz was getting in on the action, too, but unlike those in Maine, Vermont, or North Carolina, there wasn’t a strong network, or rather, any network, to tap into in the mid-Atlantic. Two highly regarded restaurants, Nora’s Restaurant in Washington and Woodbury Kitchen in Baltimore, were buying his rye and wheat, but aside from these customers I knew of only one other baker making bread with his wheat—me. At Heinz’s stand at the farmers’ market, the grain was pricey, $4 for a one-pound bag—and that was just for the grain. So Heinz had to trade on the qualities of this wheat: that it was local, and organic. Would that be enough to close the deal? People were just discovering whole grains and various types of flour, such as spelt, buckwheat, and rye, thanks to the efforts of bakers and writers who were pushing the envelope—people like Heidi Swanson, with her cookbooks and Web site, Maria Speck with her ancient grains cookbook, and Kim Boyce, who had explored whole grain pastries in yet another book, and, of course, Peter Reinhart. But none of this was as easy as slicing an heirloom tomato and popping it into your mouth.

  As for the price, I could make two decent-size whole wheat loaves from Heinz’s grain for around $2 a loaf, which was still cheaper than any bread I could buy. By comparison, organic white or whole wheat flour from the supermarket would bring the cost of a homemade loaf to less than $1. For me, that difference was hardly a deal breaker. This was a rationale I used with much of the specialty grains and flour I bought, whether the Turkey Red from Heartland, the French Mediterranean flour from Anson Mills, or Heinz’s wheat: the biggest savings, by far, came from baking at home. Adding the occasional specialty flour to the mix might cost more, but it would not erase these savings. In any case, rock-bottom, price-busting bread was the least of my motivations. After sticking with store-bought flour for a decade or more, I found that this array of grains and flours opened up new paths for experimentation.

  Around the time I went off on this local grain jag, I had to take a work trip to San Francisco, so I dropped in on Chad Robertson at Tartine. We started talking about local grains, which he had experimented with from a farm in northern California. While he liked the flour, he also found it expensive, and wasn’t sure it would work in the context of his bakery. Still, he wasn’t writing it off. “When Alice Waters switched to grass-fed beef at Chez Panisse, we thought she was crazy because there was only a farmer or two doing it,” he said. “But you know what? Everyone now has grass-fed beef on the menu. So who knows? Maybe that will happen with local grains, too.”

  • • •

  Before his forays into wheat, Heinz had sold only barley, oats, and rye. I made terrific bread with the rye, but I wondered how good the wheat would be—whether it would be reminiscent, say, of what Roland Feuillas had achieved in southern France. So one day, late in 2012, I met Heinz at the farmers’ market. He reached into a box and pulled out six one-pound bags of whole wheat kernels. Each looked slightly different, especially the white wheat, which was tan rather than brown. He was curious about whether they’d make good bread, and so was I.

  I brought the grains home, put them in the freezer, where they would keep for a long time, and then left them. I wasn’t eager to test the baking quality of the wheat because, as much as I loved the idea of local wheat, part of me feared it might make terrible bread. And then what would I tell Heinz? Plus, I had never tested flour before and wondered what an appropriate protocol would be. Should I mill the wheat and then sift out the bran? That way I might get a better idea of the protein strength unimpeded by the bran’s tendency to break down gluten. The other option was to bake 100 percent whole wheat loaves, which are not among my favorite. But that way, I could at least assess the true flavor of the grain. Should I also mill the flour and then let it sit for a couple of weeks so it oxidized and increased in gluten strength? Or should I bake with it right away, as Weichardt did in Berlin? Rather than make a decision, I avoided the issue for about six weeks while the grains sat in the freezer. But Heinz kept asking me whether I had tried the wheat, so I knew I couldn’t put him off any longer.

  Finally, one weekend in February, I took the grains out of storage and lined them up on the kitchen counter. I brought out the countertop KoMo stone mill, which could mill a range of flours from fine to coarse. The stone mill was housed in wood, with a grain hopper on top, and a funnel protruding out of the front from which the flour flowed into a bowl. Milling added a whole new variable to my baking, since the quality of the bread would be determined not just by my baking skills or my sourdough starter, but by the vagaries of the wheat and how the flour was milled. I ended up passing the grains through the mill three times, coarsely at first and then adjusting the mill wheels closer with each succeeding pass. I also took my time, letting the flour cool after each run through the mill, so I wouldn’t compromise any nutrients that degrade in heat. By the end of the process, some of the flour was quite fine, but it still had flecks of bran.

  To test the flour, I decided to stick to a 100 percent whole wheat loaf—perhaps I could learn to love the assertive taste of this bread, after all. Using a starter I had mixed up with Heartland Mill’s whole wheat flour, I began making my test doughs. To be clear, I was blending two types of flour in each loaf: about 20 percent Heartland whole wheat flour, which was in the sourdough starter, and the remaining 80 percent from each local variety. I marked the bowls of dough so I wouldn’t confuse them and then began mixing by hand.

  All four doughs came together quite nicely. Some were more extensible than others, while a baseline loaf made entirely with Heartland flour had the strongest gluten. I left the doughs to rise, folding them every thirty minutes or so, then shaped the final loaves quite gently, careful not to tear the skin or compress the loaf. Then, after a second rise, I baked them. They sprang up in the oven, and because they were 100 percent whole wheat, they came out rather dark when they were done. I had cut a diamond shape over the top of the loaves and the pattern opened up, not as dramatically as with white flour, but still noticeably.

  Whole wheat test loaf made with Faller wheat from Heinz Thomet

  When I finally sliced into them a couple of hours later, I was pleasantly surprised. This wasn’t dense, doorstop whole wheat. The crumb was light and pliable, which showed the gluten had developed sufficiently. When I e-mailed pictures of the test breads to Randy George at Red Hen in Vermont, he e-mailed back that one of the loaves, made with a hard red spring wheat, was so airy it looked like a croissant. I had thought that loaf was going to turn out to be a disaster because it had trouble holding
its shape. While it flattened out into a disk before I put it into the oven, it puffed up in the heat into a bulbous round loaf. This wheat variety, Faller, was obviously a keeper. The test loaves all varied slightly, but the differences weren’t very noticeable and they all had decent loft. My family ended up eating some of the bread, then I passed the samples on to Heinz.

  My conclusion: bread wheat, and good-quality bread wheat, can be grown in the East. The flour might not be strong enough to withstand industrial mixing machines, but if handled gently, it made a very good loaf. The key was to use a generous amount of sourdough starter as well as water, to fold and stretch the dough to build strength, and to keep an eye on fermentation, since these whole grain loaves rose quickly.

  I was quite excited about these tests so I also e-mailed Jeffrey Hamelman at King Arthur, who was testing locally grown Vermont wheat with Randy George. He was enthusiastic. “Your loaves all look good,” he wrote back, “and we’ll never know why there is such a variation, but that’s no big deal.”

  Variation, after all, was something that bakers always faced before flour was blended, before baking parameters were standardized, before wheat was modernized, and before roller mills created highly refined flour. Locally grown stone milled flour might be inconsistent, and inappropriate for efficient uniformity. But it allowed for variability, and out of variability arises personality. To unlock the intrinsic qualities of the wheat, the baker had to adjust to whatever nature might offer. And it is that attention to detail, to learning, to repetition, all with a sense of humility, that in some way defines the craft—the humanity—of the baker.