by Dan Barber
“Basically, fifty or sixty million acres’ worth of wheat has been bred, grown, and sold for high-speed mixing,” he told me. The system is efficient, well established, and built around what Americans are willing to pay for bread.
Steve pointed to still another machine, this one called the NIR, which measures for protein content. Like the alveograph and the falling-number machine, the NIR looked awkwardly out of place, its design perhaps inspired by a low-budget 1960s sci-fi film. “It’s measuring light absorption,” Steve explained. “The higher the absorption, the more protein present in the wheat.”
He poured a handful of Bauermeister, a wheat he developed nearly ten years ago, into a funnel. With the press of a button, it was released into the machine. There was a muffled whooshing sound, and sixteen seconds later Steve read the measurement.
“Ten point five percent. Good number, if you ask me. Not to mention Bauermeister is a sexy wheat—chocolate-like flavor is what they tell me. But bring this to an industrial bread-baking company and they’ll laugh in your face. Ten point five percent is wimpy wheat. Fourteen percent is manly-man wheat. They’d either make this part of a blend or feed it to pigs.”
I told Steve I once read that in France, bread wheat measuring over 11.5 percent is considered junk wheat. “That’s right,” he said. “And yet the French aren’t maligned for wimpy flour. I mean, everyone likes to dump on the French, but have you ever heard ‘Man, those French people, they don’t know how to bake a good loaf of bread’?”
The problem, as Steve described it, is that industrial bread bakers have the most muscle. Their interests determine not only what breeders select for, but also how the wheat is grown. “To get these whopping percentages, you have to fertilize your soil. There’s a direct correlation between healthy soil and good protein content, but farmers are forced to do it artificially to get these numbers every time. Every time,” Steve said. “Nature doesn’t work like that.”
In this way, he said, wheat farmers—and, when you start to follow the logic, bread bakers and eaters—are doing their part to poison the environment. Many farmers deliver an extra shot of synthetic nitrogen just before harvest to pump up the protein percentage. “They’re overfertilizing sixty million acres,” Steve said. “And for what? So the industry can bake more loaves per hour, and so they can charge you more to ‘enrich’ and ‘fortify’ it—which just means they can add tons of shit into the bread and it won’t collapse.”
He tapped his fingers on his Bauermeister wheat a few times, acknowledging its presence. “Yeah, sure,” he went on, to no one in particular, “I wish everyone grew wheat organically. But when the industry is demanding 14 percent protein, forget it. The end. It’s just not possible without nitrogen.”
This is why Steve built the lab to appeal to the people who weren’t as obsessed with protein percentage, or falling number, but with the quality of the loaf. Craft bakers, as Steve likes to distinguish them, many of whom come out of the French tradition of bread baking, rarely add sugar, and the best of them don’t use yeast or excessive amounts of salt. The natural yeast and bacteria present in the flour are activated by fermentation (mix flour and water, and wait—the wait being the crucial ingredient). The starches break down, and the sugars help develop a depth of flavor and complexity that doesn’t exist in industrial breads.
“Granted,” Steve said, “it’s a day and a half to make a loaf, versus twenty minutes, but you develop texture, flavor, and most likely a lot better nutrition.”
Like Glenn Roberts, Steve has become the neighbor, and, to a certain extent, he’s become the community organizer, too. He got here by default. Steve recognized that to breed distinctive wheat, he would have to become much more than a breeder.
His work required broadening the conversation, in concentric circles. The inner circle is the farmers—after all, they have to be persuaded to grow his varieties in the first place. But in order to persuade the farmers, he had to convince the bakers they needed better wheat. He didn’t do that the old-fashioned way—presenting the wheats to the bakers and telling them to figure out how to use them. Instead Steve turned the equation on its head. He asked bakers, What do you like? and figured out how to make it work agronomically.
“That’s what’s needed,” he said. “Because if you do not actively breed for a trait, for a flavor or a unique functionality or whatever, odds are damn close to 100 percent that you will not find them.”
Steve soon realized that bread bakers, like farmers, were only the beginning. He introduced me to Brook Brouwer, a graduate student who had recently been recruited to work on barley for malting. Barley is a hardy, disease-resistant crop, and already a valuable one for animal feed. But Steve was betting he could make it even more valuable, because Washington state microbreweries—which use over 25,000 tons of malt per year, none of it from local sources—were beginning to demand distinctive malts.
“These small breweries are just like the artisan bread bakers: they want flavor, and they want local,” Steve said. “There’s a huge opportunity to return some of the big, bold flavors we had before Prohibition.” But the malsters are more interested in selling to the big brewers, he said—“the Budweiser boys and the like.” For the past several decades, farmers around the country have grown barley with little distinction because, in yet another example of circular logic, that’s all the malsters buy—and that’s all the malsters buy because that’s all the commercial beer industry orders.
Steve was trying something new. “We’re breeding varieties of barley with flavors that will blow your mind,” he told me.
Steve had recently decided to broaden the community even further by inviting millers to the Bread Lab. The local flour mill is as much of a relic as the local slaughterhouse, he explained. “The mill closest to here was built in the ’20s,” he said. “Today it’s an Italian restaurant. The old mill in Jefferson County, next door to us? An Italian restaurant. The mill near Seattle? Torn down to make kitchen cabinets and old wood floors in Seattle and Portland.”
The small mills that remain all operate the same way: take a single harvest of wheat from a single farm and a single year, mill it, and sell it to a few local bakers. They don’t blend flours like the larger mills, which means the quality of what they produce is always in flux.
“Buying your wheat from one farmer, however romantic, is not sustainable,” he told me.
I remember thinking, It isn’t? Wasn’t I doing that with Klaas—just doing the milling ourselves?
“You’re not a bread bakery,” Steve said. “Even the bakers we work directly with can only afford so much funkiness. The reality is, the bread better taste good, and it better not be crumbly. It has to have the right texture and color and flavor, every time.” I thought of Nancy Silverton: People view bread as stability itself. You really can’t mess with that.
The local grains network won’t work, Steve said, until the baker can request a particular kind of flour, the way the big bakers do, and explain to the millers what traits he’s looking for. “That’s going to take blending,” he said. “And that’s what the Bread Lab is about—to help those millers learn to do that. That will be a beautiful maturation of the whole system.”
He showed me a corner of the room devoted entirely to milling. There was a small stone mill, a steel-plated mill, and a lab-hammer mill. “This puppy runs at nineteen thousand rpms,” he said, pointing to the hammer mill. “It just pulverizes the wheat nice and fine.”
But in his zeal to improve the consistency of flour, Steve isn’t ignoring the opportunity to change the culture of bread. He also sees the Bread Lab as a haven for experimentation—a place where chefs and bakers can learn to embrace the inconsistencies and complexities of wheat.
“When bakers spec flour, they know what they’re going to get. They don’t know what they could get,” he said. “What other kinds of complexities could you add in? It takes chefs and the bakers to pus
h that, to offer these things. But their margins are so tight, they can’t afford to mess with it. They can’t afford to make mistakes. Here we welcome mistakes. We encourage them.”
I saw Steve’s new paradigm in action when we visited a local bakery called Breadfarm, in the tiny town of Edison (population 133), a few miles from Steve’s research center. We parked down the street. A field had been mowed nearby, and the smell of freshly baked bread mingled stubbornly with the fragrances of wet earth and cut grass. Passing a poster with the image of Che Guevara, Steve turned to me. “Welcome to the revolution,” he said.
In a funny way, Steve’s small satellite research center is bringing the local food revolution straight to the people. He’s following through on the promise of the land-grant university system in the truest sense. Only, instead of merely visiting farmers in the field, he reaches out to bakeries like this one, where, as Steve described it, “the rubber meets the road.”
Inside the bakery, Steve approached the bread counter and suddenly seemed transformed. A friend of the French writer Honoré de Balzac once described the famed gourmand at mealtimes: “[His] lips quivered, his eyes lit up with delight, his hands shook with pleasure on seeing a pyramid of pears or beautiful peaches . . . tie whipped off, shirt open, knife in hand . . . [he] laughed explosively, like a bomb. . . . He melted for joy.”
Balzac came to mind as Steve feasted on the free samples, providing a play-by-play of his favorites. “Samish River Potato Bread. That’s a natural ferment, local potatoes. Real nice. Not too sour. And look here,” he said, waving his hand. “Stone Ground Wheat Miche. Local wheat in there—some of the ones I bred. Makes a hearty loaf. It’s big and serious-looking, don’t you think?”
Having surveyed the selection, he started to shake his head. The look on his face—steady, sensible, resigned, yet essentially disappointed—almost spoke for him: Why aren’t more people enjoying great bread like this?
“I get asked, why the Bread Lab and not the Wheat Lab, or something more indicative of what I’m supposed to be doing?” Steve paused to sample a sourdough, ignoring a small bowl of olive oil meant for dipping. “The problem is land-grant universities all have laboratories devoted to a particular industry. You want a pig that doesn’t produce soft meat under stressful conditions? Or a cheese stick that has a shelf life of ten thousand years? A potato chip that stays crisp in high humidity? We can breed for that! It’s supposedly in service to agriculture, but really it’s in service to big food.” The Bread Lab does not work off of an industry standard, he said. “We’re creating our own.”
Scott Mangold, the owner and baker, appeared, disheveled, covered in flour, and clearly interested in getting back to his doughs. He gave us a quick tour and answered a few questions. Steve thanked him for his time. As we gathered some bread before leaving, I asked Scott about the different flavors he’s discovered with new varieties of wheat.
He said that at first he was skeptical that wheat even could have undiscovered flavors—at least on the level that Steve described. “When I first moved to Washington State, I heard crazy crap like ‘The wheat from around here can express apricot or chocolate overtones.’ You know, really pretentious shit.”
Even after he began experimenting with Steve’s grains, Scott was still focused on functionality, the technical side of the equation. But one day he decided to set up a blind tasting with his staff.
“We’re all just standing there,” he said, “and it gets real quiet or whatever. I mean, there was a long, uncomfortable silence, and finally I say, “I’m tasting chocolate.” And everyone’s eyes just lit the hell up, like, Yeah, that’s what that is. Chocolate! We all started high-fiving each other. It was pretty awesome.”
I asked Scott if he remembered the variety of wheat. “Do I remember? I sure do. It was one of Steve’s wheats. Bauermeister.”
Klaas was right. We’ve lost the taste of wheat. And yet here it was, in the tiny town of Edison. Not just the flavors of the past, but of the future, too.
Before I left for the airport, Steve again walked me through his eight-acre test plot, with its forty thousand experimental lines. It was as extraordinary as I had remembered it.
The kaleidoscope of varieties made a mockery of the idea that wheat is generic and anonymous, that it doesn’t have as much diversity or potential for flavor as a tomato. The possibilities seemed endless, which I suppose is the point of keeping all these potential lines going. More diversity, more opportunity. It was, when I stopped to think about it, the aboveground manifestation of what Jack argued should be happening belowground. In healthy soil, the diversity of microorganisms helps ensure healthy plants—but exactly how that happens is a bit of a mystery. Looking out at these wheat varieties, I felt that same sense of mystery underlying all the possibility.
My hope that Barber wheat would become the most desired in the world suddenly felt naive. In the best scenario, Barber wheat would do what all of the wheat I was looking at had the potential to do: thrive in a specific environment and remain open for selection on the most local of terms. It was Borlaug in reverse, really—breeding for greater distinction rather than dumbing down wheat in an effort to make it grow everywhere.
Steve’s field—and the community of farmers, bakers, chefs, millers, brewers, and breeders that orbits around it—is a new kind of botanical ark, one that preserves the past by allowing those genes to thrive in the future. It dares us to re-create our relationship to wheat, to do what we all really want for our children, which is to provide them with the genetics to succeed while at the same time celebrating their distinctiveness.
I wanted a bird’s-eye view of the diversity, just as, a few years earlier, I’d gotten a look at the dehesa from a rooftop. Back then, I’d seen how farming could sculpt a landscape—the pigs leading the dance of grazing cattle and sheep, the enormous oaks interspersed among the famously lush grasses, and the community of homes and churches dotting the landscape. From that perch, I’d seen how interconnected it all was.
Steve’s experimental plot didn’t require a rooftop for me to see that the real connective power wasn’t in the field. It was in the way he’d fashioned the Bread Lab. In opting out of building what he should have built—a laboratory focused only on creating new wheat varieties—Steve enlarged the vision. He complicated the picture. The Bread Lab functions like those rich striations of jamón ibérico fat Eduardo held up to the light. It keeps all the disparate parts together. It also forces them to mingle.
John Muir, who described how everything in nature is “hitched to everything else in the Universe,” would not have said the same about our current food system. Because our food system is disconnected. It operates in silos: vegetables here, animals there, grains somewhere else—each component part separate from the others and unhitched to any kind of culture.
Steve devised the Bread Lab to do the work that wheat, a social crop, always used to do: create community. He forces the socialization a little, much as Klaas and Mary-Howell’s grain mill forces the community of Penn Yan farmers to exchange ideas. He clears the way for connections to happen. He helps the hitching.
Steve’s work is not merely the difference between the tabletop monocultures of Kansas and a field like this one. It is the difference between an antiquated system of agriculture and the possibility for a future of delicious food.
EPILOGUE
EVER SINCE I started cooking professionally, I have been sensitive to the evening hours between 5:30 and 7:00, from the late spring through the first weeks of fall. Photographers and film directors call this the golden hour, the magic time in the day when the sun is low in the sky and the light turns soft, diffusing over everything it touches.
Chefs miss out on the golden hour because most professional kitchens don’t have windows. But I’ve never heard a chef grumble about missing this time of day. I’ve never heard one even mention it, though I think about it all the time. No one warned me that my c
areer, which is to say most of my life, would require that I not only miss the most magical time of the day but also that I feel the most stressed at the most magical time of the day. The first orders of the evening arrive at the pass just after 5:30 p.m., as the cooks finish their preparations and launch into dinner service. Our pressurized little world gets much more pressurized during those golden hours we cannot see.
The first time I visited Stone Barns, four years before the center opened to the public, it was late in the day. I walked into the former milking area, which was already slated to become Blue Hills’s kitchen. It wasn’t the size of the space or the plans for its transformation that gripped me. It was the south wall, with its five sun-drenched windows. They looked out on a courtyard surrounded by the collection of Norman-style stone barns. Windows, I said to myself, as if this were all that mattered. This kitchen would have windows. I felt like the luckiest chef in the world.
Imagine my surprise when, after just a week of watching that golden-hour light bouncing off the old barns, I found myself turning away from the scene. I realized the windows only made me more miserable: I could see what I was missing.
I was thinking about those missed hours one summer evening not long ago while having dinner in Klaas and Mary-Howell’s kitchen. It was my first visit to their farm in two years. Looking out the back window, I watched the sun splash golden light across a field of emmer wheat.
Chefs, in my experience, seem especially captivated by farms scenes like this. That’s not because our success depends on the quality of what those fields produce (though of course it does) but because in our windowless, turbulent little world, a farm seems like a rare dose of what endures. Watching the wheat field as it played tricks with the fading sun, I felt a sense of serenity and stasis.