Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (39 page)

Whole-wheat Wonder Bread!
This has
all the makings of a happy ending, in which the human quest for softer, sweeter, whiter,
and airier bread is married to the nutritional benefits of whole grain. But things are
seldom that simple in the food industry. The White Flour Industrial Complex is not about
to go quietly into the dark-bread night. How could it, when its mills have been
expressly designed to produce
the whitest possible flour, splitting
off the germ and embryo at the first break? When milling white flour and selling off the
nutrients is more profitable than selling flour whole? To leave the germ in the flour
would literally gum up the works, I was told by an experienced miller by the name of Joe
Vanderliet. This is why it is always removed at the beginning of the milling process,
even when making “whole” wheat flour.

“The engineering and the nutrition are
pulling in opposite directions,” Vanderliet explained. Most commercial whole-wheat
flour is actually white flour to which the bran and germ have been added back in.
Whether such reconstituted flour is as good, or good for you, as flour from wheat milled
whole on a stone is questionable, but the industry can’t do it any other way.

Adapting the reductive logic of industrial
bread baking to the complexities of whole grain can’t be easy. What do you do
about the volatility of the germ? Vanderliet claims that many large mills, including
ones he used to work for, simply leave the germ out of their “whole-grain”
flour “because it’s just too much trouble”—a serious charge, but a
difficult one to prove. (So here we are again, not quite certain what is really in a
sack of flour.) And what to do about the bitterness of the bran in modern wheat
varieties? (Most commercial whole-grain breads cover it up with sweeteners.) Or the
difficulty of leavening whole-grain dough with commercial yeast? This last problem was
(literally) the downfall of a great many hippie loaves; without a sourdough culture to
promote gluten development, 100-percent whole-grain breads tend to rise lethargically
and crumble in the toaster. Yet it is hard to imagine the bakers at Hostess taking on
the care and feeding of a temperamental culture of unidentified wild bacteria and
yeast.

By now I was curious to find out exactly how
Wonder Bread solved the riddle of baking a whole-wheat white bread. Was it actually
possible to modify the logic of an industrial system based on white
flour to produce a genuine and appealing whole-grain loaf? So before the company went
belly-up I put in a call to the Texas headquarters of Hostess Brands, managed to get
through to the public-affairs office, and asked the young man who answered the phone if
I might visit one of their factories to learn how whole-wheat Wonder Bread was made. It
was his first day on the job, but he promised to get back to me. I was pleasantly
surprised when, a week later, I received an e-mail informing me that a visit to the
Hostess bakery in Sacramento had been approved. When I studied the map, I saw that the
Hostess plant was only an hour or so south of Dave Miller’s bakery—the artisanal
whole-grain baker for whom Chad Robertson had worked—so I decided I would pay a visit to
his bakery after my tour at the Hostess plant. Dave Miller mills his own grain and bakes
400, 100 percent whole-grain loaves a week for sale at the farmers’ market. The
Hostess plant produced up to 155,000 loaves a day for sale at supermarkets across the
western United States. It promised to be a day of extremes.

The Hostess plant occupies a sprawling,
one-story industrial building on the outskirts of Sacramento. The smell of bread hits
you in the parking lot, pleasant at first, but soon oddly cloying. Before the plant
manager escorted me onto the factory floor, he handed me earplugs to muffle the din. A
single waist-high production line snakes through the dim, cavernous space, vaguely
reminiscent of a wildly ambitious model train set, with loaves of bread in metal pans
taking the place of train cars. The line traveled all the way from the silos that store
flour out back to the mixing drums, through the dough cutters and shapers, into the
proofing chamber, beneath the scoring machine (where a thin jet of water neatly scores
each loaf), into the tunnel-like oven,
then onto the slicing and
bagging machine, and finally the twist-tie-er, which puts exactly four twists into every
tie. The same line can produce Classic Wonder Bread, or Made with Whole Grain White or
Soft 100% Whole Wheat as well as Nature’s Pride, a new line of
“all-natural”—i.e., no chemical additives—whole-grain and -grainish breads,
in roughly the same amount of time: four hours, from flour dump to cooled, sliced,
packaged, and twist-tied loaf.

The genius of the food scientists at Hostess
has been to alter the ingredient formulas (type of flour, amount of yeast, source of
fiber) without otherwise disturbing a mechanized system designed to bake white bread
quickly. From the point of view of the bakers running the line, bread is pretty much
bread, whether white, whole grain, whole grainish, no-high-fructose-corn-syrup,
ton-o’-fiber, or whatever the currently compelling health claim dictates. Though
the bakers did complain, cheerfully, about the challenge of getting air into breads that
had to contain so much added fiber and minerals—“raising all that garbage,”
one called it. Many of the company’s “healthier” brands are fortified
with calcium, a mineral not ordinarily associated with wheat, but these days a
compelling health claim.

“You’re basically breaking up
rock and throwing it in your dough,” the head baker explained. He was talking
about the challenge of adding prodigious amounts of calcium to bread, and his candor was
disarming. “It takes a helluva lot of yeast to lift all that rock.”
That’s when it clicked that the cloying odor—now upgraded to slightly
nauseating—was the smell of yeast, lots and lots of it.

Having by now spent time in bakeries, and
done a fair amount of baking at home, I was struck by how similar and yet at once how
very different the industrial version of bread baking is. I watched flour and water
being mixed into the familiar cement-colored slurry—and yet what are all those other
ingredients getting added to the mix? The fifty-pound bags labeled simply “dough
conditioner”? The
ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides? The four
types of sugar (high-fructose corn syrup, molasses, barley-malt extract, and corn syrup
solids)? The wheat gluten and ammonium chloride and calcium propionate and sodium
stearoyl lactylate and “yeast nutrients”? And why would yeasts living in
such sweet dough need
more
nutrients, anyway? To balance their sugary diet?

The bakers in charge couldn’t tell me
the function of the thirty-one ingredients listed on a package of Soft 100% Whole Wheat;
they suggested I ask the food scientists at headquarters. But HQ wouldn’t let me
to talk to their food scientists, ostensibly for fear they would inadvertently disclose
proprietary baking secrets. Eventually I was able to ascertain from other food
scientists the specific functions of the thirty-one ingredients, most of which fell into
one or more of these categories: to back up a health claim; to “condition”
the dough so it doesn’t stick to and thereby slow the machines; to get as much air
into the dough as rapidly as possible; to give the bread the cottony texture and moist
cakey crumb consumers expect from the Wonder brand; to protect the bread from staling or
molding; and, last but far from least, to sweeten the bread and thereby cover up the
bitterness of bran and, even more important, the chemical taste of all the other
additives.

Once upon a time not so long ago, most of
those chemical additives would have been deemed “adulterants” by the Food
and Drug Administration. But after an all-out campaign of lobbying by the baking
industry in the 1950s, the FDA liberalized its “standard of identity” for
bread, permitting bakeries to add dozens of new additives to what had previously been a
simple two- or three-ingredient food. Earlier in the twentieth century, a group of
experts convened by the International Congress for the Suppression of Fraud (
quaint
idea!
) proposed a legal definition of bread that the loaves I was watching
being baked would not have met. “The word bread, without any qualifier,
is exclusively reserved for the product resulting from cooking dough
made with a mixture of wheat flour, sourdough culture or yeast (made from beer or
grain), drinking water, and salt.” How far this thing called bread has come!

And yet even after all these novel
ingredients have been mixed into the dough, the process still sort of resembles the
baking of bread. At one point early in the tour I stepped into the sponge room, where
big hoppers filled with wet dough are bubbling and rising like sofa cushions as they
undergo bulk fermentation. The only difference from a bulk fermentation in my kitchen or
at Tartine is how quickly it happens here. By putting vast quantities of yeast to
work—as much as 10 percent by weight—Hostess can get the great big belch of CO
₂
needed to raise a whole-grain or super-high-fiber dough in
just an hour or two.

Indeed, much of the innovation in industrial
baking has gone into speeding up what has traditionally and perhaps necessarily been a
slow process. But time is money. So the dough is inoculated with legions of fast-acting
yeast to speed its rise; it then gets one set of conditioners so it can withstand rapid
handling by machines, and another to speed up (or replace) gluten development, and then
it is heavily sweetened, so that even a 100 percent whole-grain loaf will deliver that
quick hit of sugar on the tongue the consumer has come to expect from white bread. In
the end, what has been removed from industrial bread by the addition of so many chemical
additives is the ingredient of time.

Yet there are problems with speeding up
whole-grain bread, and they begin with the flour. Many if not most of the new
whole-grain white breads on the market are made with a new variety of hard white wheat
developed by ConAgra. This is why the bread doesn’t look like whole wheat: the
specks of bran are white, or whitish. They are also microscopic: The wheat is milled by
ConAgra using a
patented process called Ultrafine that attains a
degree of fineness never before achieved in a whole-grain flour. This resulting flour,
called Ultragrain, makes for a softer, whiter whole-grain bread, but at a price. It is
metabolized almost as fast as white flour, obviating one of the most important health
advantages of whole grains: that our bodies absorb and metabolize them slowly, and so
avoid the insulin spikes that typically accompany refined carbohydrates. A common
measure of the speed by which a food raises glucose levels in the blood (and therefore
insulin, an important risk factor for many chronic diseases) is the glycemic index. The
glycemic index of a whole-grain Wonder Bread (around 71) is essentially the same as that
of Classic Wonder-bread (73). (By comparison, the glycemic index of whole-grain bread
made with stone-ground flour is only 52.) So perhaps we really have gotten too smart for
our own good.

Using commercial yeast to leaven whole-grain
flour so rapidly may present another problem for our health. All whole grains contain
phytic acid, which locks up minerals not only in the bread but, if you eat enough of it,
in the body of the bread eater as well. One of the advantages of a long sourdough
fermentation, as we’ve seen, is that it breaks down the phytic acid, freeing up
those minerals. It also makes the gluten proteins more digestible and slows the
body’s absorption of starch. That’s why a sourdough white bread actually has
a lower glycemic index than a commercially yeasted whole-grain bread.

There is a second paradox here: Wonder Bread
would seem to be a much more highly processed product than the bread I bake at home,
with its dozens of additional ingredients and high-speed production methods. And yet,
since the wheat in it never undergoes a true fermentation, Wonder Bread is in some
respects
less
processed—less completely cooked—than the bread I bake at home.
At least when it comes to processing wheat, sometimes less is more and more turns out to
be less.