by Dan Barber
“The wheat, it seemed to want my attention,” Alex said. He modified the recipe again, raising the water temperature, mixing the dough even longer, and changing the size of the mold. After several days of testing, he reported that he finally understood the new harvest.
“It’s like a good wine,” he said. “Every year is different. So you have to adjust. Every time you have to relearn it. But that’s the nice thing about these flours. You just have to follow, basically, nature’s instructions.” Within a few days, his patience had paid off. He brought the brioche for me to taste.
The bread had the same nuttiness we had tasted in the first batch, but with a new honeyed spice flavor that was uniquely its own. And it seemed just a little lighter, with more cavities in the crumb, or interior, of the bread. Holding a piece up close, I thought back to the subterranean reaches of Jack’s vegetable field, with its miles of routes for microorganisms to maneuver. Back then, Jack had explained how the organisms’ ceaseless activity provided the plant with everything it needed to produce delicious flavors. I bit into another slice of the brioche and tasted exactly what he meant.
We suffer from a prejudice against whole grains.
You could say we were born that way. We covet white flour because it is sweeter than whole wheat. Humans evolved with powerful preferences for sugar because of our need for energy-rich foods. In his book Breaking the Spell, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett argues that our sweet tooth is really evolutionary biology at play. There is nothing “intrinsically sweet” about sugar molecules—rather, we developed an instinctual liking for sweets because they provided more energy. It’s the brain’s way of rewarding us for seeking out calories. Refined white flour satisfies those same urges by delivering a hearty shot of glucose more efficiently than whole grains. With no fibrous bran, there is nothing to slow the conversion of starches to sugars. A nutritionist I know once compared refined white flour to crack cocaine—a pure, immediate hit that only makes you crave more.
Another theory sees our preference for refined wheat in sociocultural terms—a food trend that has endured for thousands of years. Ancient Romans ground and filtered flour through fine linen. The whitest, softest loaves of bread were reserved for the privileged classes; poor peasants ate coarse loaves made of mixed grains. Over time, this mark of social distinction became entrenched. Dishonest millers added mashed potatoes, chalk, sawdust, or even dried bones or poisonous white lead to get whiter flour at any cost.
But there’s a culinary logic to our preference, too, one that is reinforced today by bread bakers who believe that great bread has more to do with craftsmanship than with wheat. Jim Lahey, the head baker and proprietor of Sullivan Street Bakery, in New York City, once told a group of bakers and farmers, “You could give me dog-shit wheat and I could make it taste great.” I believe him. In the hands of a skilled baker, denuded wheat, stripped of its bran and germ (and therefore its flavor), is no hindrance. In fact, when the baker is after the open, airy “French crumb,” it helps to work with refined flour.
Flour contains proteins that produce a magical substance called gluten, which, under the right conditions, stretches like a rubber band. The magic here is how it keeps its shape without snapping back to its original form. (The gluten in pasta dough is what allows it to be rolled out thinly without it shrinking back or falling apart.) As a general rule, the higher the protein content, the stronger the gluten, and the more space the dough has to capture the carbon dioxide released from the yeast as it grows and divides. This is what makes light-textured bread.
The bran in whole wheat flour acts like little shards of glass slicing through gluten, resulting in heavier, denser breads. (In part, Alex’s brioche is so light because of the butter, eggs, and milk.) Even the most experienced bakers find it hard to make an airy whole wheat loaf.
The packaged-bread industry, capitalizing on our preference for light-textured breads, has pushed wheat breeders to select for higher protein percentages and stronger gluten, ensuring maximum dough strength. It doesn’t hurt that dough strength is also essential for speedy baking. Industrial bakeries demand that dough act like steel scaffolding—holding its shape under the assault of large-volume mixing and lightning-fast proofing on its way to a fluffed, full loaf. The faster the flour moves from dough to loaf, the more loaves can be baked per hour.
Perhaps they took our preference a bit too far. In his 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak charged the food industry with destroying our staple food. “The bread is as soft as floss,” he wrote. “It takes no effort to chew, and yet it is vitamin enriched.”
Ask any chef today about the effect that packaged breads have had on dumbing down the American palate and Roszak’s claim doesn’t seem far off.
The countercuisine movement of the 1960s and ’70s tried to redeem whole wheat. Hoping to reclaim the flavors of a pre-industrialized food system, it demonized white foods, which represented not only heavily processed, sanitized, and denuded ingredients but also the blandness of modern American culture. (“Don’t eat white; eat right; and fight.”) The new philosophy was codified in the best-selling Tassajara Bread Book. Part gentle manifesto (the book is illustrated with drawings of laughing Buddhas and cats), part cookbook, it perfectly captured the longing for a wholesome alternative to industrial food and farming.
Countercuisine began to embody ethical eating in broader terms—not just by embracing particular foods and habits (vegetarianism, communal dining) but by scrutinizing the entire food chain. Who was growing your food? How was it getting to you? Everything mattered. But not everything tasted good. Especially the bread. Whole wheat loaves from the countercuisine era often seemed more like bricks, better suited to building forts. They were virtuous, but they weren’t always delicious.
“Anything that had ‘whole wheat’ or ‘whole grains’ on the label, you knew right away had all the implications of bad natural foods,” Nancy Silverton, the founder of La Brea Bakery, in Los Angeles, told me.” And a lot of them were bad.
Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for Vogue, once wrote about his experience baking whole grain bread. “The worst loaf of bread I ever baked,” he begins, “was the Tibetan Barley Bread in The Tassajara Bread Book . . . so heavy and dense that it was an accomplishment to slice and unpleasant to eat without first slathering it with butter.” Steingarten did say the book included other rewarding breads. But he tapped into the Achilles’ heel of countercuisine—bad cuisine.
And yet the cuisine doesn’t deserve all the blame. For me, the tip-off came from the dusty-smelling brioche that Alex made with conventional whole wheat flour. It didn’t taste good, either. The truth is, most of the whole wheat grown in this country does not taste good. And we’re not going to be drawn to whole wheat, or persuaded to change our bread preferences, unless it does.
So the question is why—why did that batch of pre-ground conventional whole wheat flour taste so different from Klaas’s? If it was the same ingredient (sort of), why couldn’t it approximate the version we were grinding ourselves?
One answer has to do with fresh milling. The natural oils in the wheat germ are what imbue it with flavor, but they have a short shelf life. Seriously short—they begin to spoil as soon as they are released. Which means that in order to capture the grain’s aroma, the flour has to be fresh. That’s true for nutrients as well—flour has been shown to lose almost half its nutrients within just twenty-four hours of milling. Truly whole whole wheat flour, you could argue, means milling it yourself. If that sounds like the worst sort of food snobbery, think of coffee: no self-respecting barista uses pre-ground beans. Increasingly, neither do serious home coffee drinkers.
Another answer is soil. Whereas Klaas employed thoughtful crop rotations and careful soil management to ensure that his wheat had great flavor, the conventional batch undoubtedly came from chemically doused fields, starved of nutrients.
But I’ve come to understand
that even soil doesn’t dial back far enough. Its microorganisms can be thriving, and you can still end up with flavorless wheat—because modern wheat (unlike Klaas’s heirloom varieties) is not bred for flavor. It’s bred for monocultures and high yield, and for industrial milling and baking.
We’ve lost the taste of wheat, in part, because we’ve stopped breeding it for flavor.
CHAPTER 27
TO WHAT extent do genetics decide the taste of wheat?
I knew from experience that certain varieties—an heirloom tomato, for instance, or the Eight Row Flint corn I had tasted many years earlier—could have drastic implications for flavor. But it took another revelation for me to grasp what good breeding looked like in the wheat world.
It happened the next time Alex ran out of Klaas’s emmer. Once again he ordered a batch of whole wheat flour to replace it, but this time the flour came from Anson Mills, an artisanal grain company run by Glenn Roberts, the same philanthropist and seedsman who had sent us the Eight Row Flint corn.
“Okay, we try this here,” Alex said the day the Antebellum Style Rustic Coarse Graham Wheat Flour arrived. “‘Graham.’ This I do not know, but we try.”
I didn’t expect much from a graham flour brioche. Can you blame me? Named for nineteenth-century dietary reformer Sylvester Graham, who preached the virtues of coarsely ground whole wheat flour (especially when baked at home by a wife tending to the nutritive needs of the family), graham flour is about culinary asceticism, not excellence. It brings to mind good digestion, cardboard flavor, and a dry mouth. I figured we would end up preferring the dusty-smelling whole wheat flour Alex had used a few months earlier.
But later in the day, Alex brought over a loaf. “This I love,” he said. After a slice, then two, then three—just out of the oven, the bread was impossible not to eat—I thought about Graham. His wholesome prescription for a simpler life turned out to be very tasty. It was softer, sweeter, and in some ways even more flavorful than Klaas’s emmer. The graham flour made its way into the small bakery we operate next to the restaurant: graham cookies, flatbreads, scones, and, in what I thought was a novel twist on an old southern staple, graham biscuits.
When I called Glenn to learn more about his process, he told me that he grinds all his flour by hand, at cold temperatures, to preserve the flavor and the nutrition—Graham’s original intent. The industrial process does neither.
But that was only part of the equation. To Glenn, “graham” designates more than just a style of milling; it also refers to a particular kind of wheat. Glenn’s graham flour comes from Red May, which, he explained, was one of the varieties originally used in the nineteenth century. Ill-suited to roller milling, it was mostly grown in small kitchen plots and ground by hand. It had nearly disappeared until Glenn himself managed to resurrect it.
Glenn told me his goal was not only to provide the best-tasting varieties but also to explore how and why these varieties were created in the first place. “No one gets back to the place-based idea of what cuisine means—why a bread is in fashion, why it’s diverse, or even what a local loaf looks like,” he said. “If you’re not selecting for any of these important things—in other words, if you’re not selecting for flavor—your wheat won’t taste good.” His interest in wheats like Red May was only one part of a larger project to resurrect a whole system of forgotten crops—wheat, but also corn, beans, and rice—that had once formed the foundation of southern food culture. “My life’s work is the repatriation of a lost cuisine,” he told me. Just like that, something clicked. If I was after not only great-tasting wheat, but also a way to integrate all of Klaas’s rotations into my cuisine, Glenn might provide some much-needed insight.
THE RICE KITCHEN
Glenn once thought he knew all there was to know about southern food. In the spring of 1997, working as a consultant for a large hotel chain, he was hired to arrange a historic dinner for the Smithsonian’s board of directors in Savannah, Georgia. It was an important gathering, and Glenn worked hard to make it successful. He spoke to locals, read the latest cookbooks on southern cuisine, and settled on an ambitious menu that included Savannah red rice, a legacy as much cultural as gastronomic, from what was once the world’s most prosperous rice-growing region. He bought the best local tomatoes and pork for the dish and made sure the rice was dried slowly on top of the stove and finished in the oven.
Glenn knew rice. Though he was raised in La Jolla, California, his mother had grown up in South Carolina, at the epicenter of southern cuisine known as the Carolina Rice Kitchen. Culinary historian Karen Hess defines a rice kitchen as a place of rice worship, where the grain was on the table with every meal. For Glenn, it describes his childhood.
“Breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he told me. “No matter what we were eating, it was always, always served with rice. And there was always rice on the stove.” Glenn was allowed to cook rice only for the dogs. And sometimes the cats. “If I even touched the rice pot on the stove, I didn’t get dinner,” he said. “It was hell on road trips, too, FYI. Everyone wanted hot dogs, but Mom prepared rice stews.”
Glenn remembers his mother’s complaints about the quality of the rice that was available in supermarkets. “It wasn’t the garden-variety carping you get from older generations,” he said. “It was deeper than that.” Having grown up on hand-milled Carolina Gold rice from the Lowcountry region (named for the low-lying coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia), she felt offended by “machine rice,” which was all there was in California in the 1950s. “She hated the aroma right out of the box. She said it smelled like vitamin tablets.”
The dinner for the Smithsonian board went well, or so Glenn believed, until a letter arrived a few days later. “I can still remember holding that letter in my hand,” he told me. “It was a searing critique. ‘Do you even know anything about Southern foodways?’ Apparently I did not.” The writer lambasted him for every course he had chosen to serve.
Humiliated, Glenn began reading about the history of southern cuisine—and was shocked by what he learned. “Jesus Christ, I said to myself. This all happened here? Some of the best wine in the world was once grown in Savannah? And the best food was produced and sent all over the world from right here? Like the red rice, which was actually red, and not made by adding ketchup to the white stuff.”
Glenn kept reading, gathering source material from more than 140 texts. The more he learned, the more astonished he became. Not only had the South established the preeminent cuisine of this country, but the cuisine had evolved from a supremely advanced farming system unparalleled in nineteenth-century America.
“It was the best market system in existence,” Glenn told me. “Everybody came here to study it. We were the seedsmen to the planet, the envy of the world for our cuisine. How the heck did that happen?”
It happened in part out of necessity. By the 1820s, the South’s main cash crops, such as tobacco, cotton, and corn, had exhausted the soil. Large tracts of land throughout the East were worn out, and many farmers moved west, where they would repeat the same model of extraction agriculture (leading to the destruction of the prairie, among other tragedies).
Glenn claims that it was this soil crisis that forced the farmers who stayed behind to try something new. From 1820 to 1880, agriculture in the South became largely experimental. Farming journals were printed and widely dispersed, agricultural societies formed, and prizes for the best varieties were routinely awarded at fairs and exhibitions. Model farms and plantations demonstrated the virtues of crop rotations, intercropping, and green manuring. If you were a farmer during this time, you were likely a breeder, too, and something of a soil scientist. Integrated farming became a necessity for restoring fertility to the soil.
“Call it the age of scientific farming, or just a time when our backs were against the wall,” Glenn told me, “but the antebellum South was a watershed period of intense, almost frenzied experimentalism. It led to the most
important era of vegetable breeding in the history of this country.”
The desperate attempts to plant crops that would succeed, and work in tandem to repair the soil, turned Charleston and the surrounding Lowcountry into a center of seed diversity. Crops were imaginative and varied: African rice, Italian olives, South American quinoa, and Spanish Seville oranges. Glenn found farm journals documenting fields filled with forty kinds of rutabaga or dozens of varieties of sesame seed. And the successes were broadcast quickly, ushering in a boom of new vegetable and grain cultivars.
“The really interesting part,” Glenn said, “is that unlike any other time in American history, and I would argue any time since, taste was the determining factor. Taste. Even a good-yielding crop—if it didn’t taste great, it didn’t get replanted.”
Lowcountry cuisine came together out of this cornucopia, as well as through the collision of Native American, European, and African cultures. Gastronomic societies formed. Cookbooks were quickly written to store the recipes.
Of course, there was an uncomfortable duality to this short historical period. Flavorful food was widely available; in many places, it was the only food available. But it happened at a time when the South was still in the grips of slavery.
“At least initially,” Glenn said, “everyone experimenting with kitchen gardens had a slave. They did the work. They almost always did the cooking, too. We had a bunch of wealthy white people who could afford to write books about what some really smart black people were doing.”
The Carolina Rice Kitchen—what Glenn refers to as the “belle epoque of good eating,” with rice as the standard-bearer—evolved out of the soil crisis and slavery, which is to say out of both ecological and human desperation, providing the impetus for America’s first complete and distinct regional cuisine. Glenn’s mother merely knew it as the food she was raised on.