Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (42 page)

I left Certified Foods with two sacks of
flour and some new ideas about how to bake a better loaf of whole-grain bread. For
Vanderliet, everything came back to the seed—that “perfect package.” To mill
good whole-grain flour, the miller had to understand what was going on in that package,
not just the parts—the germ, bran, and endosperm—but the intricate relationship between
them, and the biological system at work. The function of that system was to protect the
embryo of a new wheat plant until the time came for it to germinate, and then to supply
all the nutrients the new plant needed to get its start in life. This much is obvious,
but the implications for milling, and in turn for baking bread, are not.

During my tour I had asked Joe if he wetted,
or tempered, his grain before milling it, something commercial mills routinely do in
order to loosen the bran coat so that it will more easily slip off the seed.
“Never!” he barked. Wetting the seed, he explained, ruins whole-grain flour.
As soon as the bran coat absorbs water, the seed receives a signal to germinate, setting
off a cascade of chemical events
in the germ and bran that would
destabilize any flour that still contained them. (Since the bran and germ are removed
when milling white flour, tempering in that case is not a problem.) Enzymes are
activated. Some of them begin to break open the polymers of starch and protein, while
others liberate the sequestered minerals—all to nourish the nascent plant. The
miller’s job is to keep the seed in dormant mode rather than throw it into
germination mode.

“So, to mill whole-grain flour
well,” I had said to Joe, “you really have to be able to think like a seed,
don’t you?” He smiled.

“You’re a very good
student.”

That’s when it dawned on me: The same
holds true for the baker. He, too, needs to think like a seed in order to bake a
whole-grain loaf full of flavor and air. Except that his seed thoughts are a little
different from the miller’s. The baker
wants
to set off that cascade of
chemical events. He wants the amylase enzymes to break up those tasteless balls of
starch, creating simple sugars to flavor his bread and feed his hungry yeasts. (The
baker needs to think like yeast and bacteria, too, which is a lot of thinking.) The
baker wants the proteases to begin breaking the wheat proteins into amino acids and the
phytase to unlock the minerals, not to nourish the plant but to nourish us. And water
was the key.

I had read about techniques for
“presoaking” flours—part of the traditional culture of whole-grain baking
that we have lost—and now I understood the logic behind them: to trick the crushed seed
into thinking it was time to germinate. So I embarked on a set of experiments to
kick-start the enzymatic activity in my dough even before fermentation got under way. I
began mixing my flour and water in the evening, at the same time I started my leaven.
Not until the next morning, however, would I introduce the one to the other. By the time
the sourdough culture began to work on the presoaked flour, it would find all the
nutrients it could want: plenty of sugars, amino
acids, and minerals.
This was a fact I could taste: The flour sweetened dramatically overnight. And the
results out of the oven were encouraging. I started getting loaves that were generous
with their flavors, had crispier and more handsome crusts (probably because more sugars
and amino acids were available for browning reactions), and markedly more air.

But not quite as much air as I hoped for,
not yet. The bran was still undermining the gluten, either by puncturing the gas bubbles
or by weighing them down, giving me a too-tight crumb. I hit on a slightly wacky idea: I
would remove the bran from the inside of the bread and put it on the outside, where it
could do no damage to the gluten. So, before mixing my flour and water, I sifted the
chunkiest bran out of the flour, maybe 10 percent of the total volume.

In effect, I was making white (or whitish)
flour circa 1850, pre–roller mill, the kind of flour in the painting by Émile Friant
that had inspired Chad Robertson. It still had the germ, but only those particles of
bran small enough to slip through an ordinary sieve. However, I reserved the sifted bran
in a bowl, and after shaping the loaves, I rolled them in the stuff, making sure that
every last shard of bran was taken up by the wet skin of the dough.

It worked: The trick allowed me to bake an
airy and delicious loaf with a toasty, particulate crust—all the while preserving my
claim to a “100 percent whole-grain” bread. Does this seem like cheating? I
don’t think so: Every last bit of the whole grain was somewhere in this
triumphantly voluminous loaf. I felt like I had broken whole grain’s Gordian
knot.

Though on reflection I seriously doubt this
solution is original with me. In the age-old quest to bake the airiest possible loaf
from whole-grain flour, a great many other bakers would surely have hit on the same
trick. Like presoaking flours, it is too good an adaptation not to have been tried
before. In all likelihood, “my” technique or
one like it
is part of the traditional culture of whole-grain baking that got crushed by the roller
mills late in the nineteenth century.

In the weeks and months since, I’ve
loosened up considerably in my baking. I still mostly use whole-grain flours, but I no
longer obsess about percentages or purity. I don’t always roll my loaves in
bran—sometimes I use it in the garden instead, to thwart slugs and snails. I’ve
also found a commercial version of the kind of flour I was making by sifting whole
grains. Called “high extraction” flours, these are milled whole and then
partially sifted. This strikes me as a reasonable compromise between 100 percent
whole-grain and white flour, between nutrition and aesthetics. (After all, even
100-percent whole-grain flour is 75-percent endosperm.) But even when I bake with these
flours, I add a variety of other whole grains to deepen and complicate the bread’s
flavor: some pumpernickel that I got from Joe Vanderliet, some purple rye that Chad
Robertson gave me, even lately some Kernza, an experimental flour milled (whole) from a
new strain of perennial grain being developed by the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. A
perennial wheat field that could be mowed like a lawn rather than planted each year from
seed would have tremendous benefits for both the land and the farmer, but it is probably
still some ways off. Kernza has an interesting flavor but, as yet, not enough gluten to
raise a loaf of bread on its own.

Everything that I’ve learned about
wheat and milling, fermentation and baking has definitely complicated my understanding
of what “good bread” is, but that hasn’t dimmed my ardor for the
stuff. When I buy whole-grain bread I look for words like “stone milled” and
“whole grain”
^*
and I check the ingredients to
make sure whole grain is listed first. And, white or brown, I look for breads that have
been
fermented with a sourdough culture; the word “levain”
indicates as much. And I stay away from any bread containing any ingredient that
isn’t the name of a grain or salt.

But I try to bake my own when I can, and I
can see that I’ve gotten fairly improvisational in my baking. I never look at
recipes anymore. Instead, I look at dough, and feel it, taste it, and smell it, almost
continuously. I also check in every morning with my starter, gauging by eye and nose its
happiness before feeding it a few tablespoons of fresh flour and water. When I started
baking a few months ago, I could never have imagined the work would become such an
intuitive and sensory process—or such an obsession—but there it is. Actually, baking has
begun to feel a lot like gardening, a pastime, or practice, I’ve been working at
much longer.

In my experience, gardening successfully
depends on two different but related faculties, both highly relevant to baking. The
first is the green thumb’s ability to notice and absorb everything going on in his
garden, from the precise tint of the leaves to the aroma of the soil. The data of your
senses have more to tell you about the work than anything you can read in a book. The
second is the green thumb’s knack for imagining what his plants and soil want in
order to be maximally happy and thrive. Same with baking bread: It helps to be able to
think like a grass seed and, at the same time, like the community of yeasts and bacteria
living in your sourdough culture. Control you can just forget about: There are too many
interests and variables in play. (The dream of control is seductive, but it leads
straight to monoculture in the field and fortified white bread in the supermarket.)
Behind a great loaf of bread is a deft orchestration, not only of time and temperature,
but also of a great many diverse species and interests, our own—for something nourishing
and delicious to eat—included. I am no maestro, no white thumb yet, but my bread is
getting tastier, and airier, all the time.

The morning before I toured the mill in
Woodland, I paid a visit to one of the growers that supply wheat to Community Grains.
The Rominger family plants a dozen or so different crops, and runs sheep, on seven
thousand acres of rich, dark bottomland a few miles down the road from Woodland, near
the town of Winters. They use wheat as a rotational crop, planting it in November,
before the winter rains, and harvesting it in the scorching heat of July.

I had never set foot in a wheat field
before. Yet the sight of one is so iconic that the landscape feels immediately familiar,
weirdly so. Standing in a field of wheat, it is impossible not to think about Flemish
painters like Brueghel or van Ruisdael, or van Gogh. The wheat itself has changed—modern
breeders have made the plant shorter in stature and its seed head fatter—but from a
distance the overwhelming impression of ripe golden bounty, of nature’s grace and
sufficiency, remains indelible. The Romingers’ wheat crop was still a few weeks
away from harvest, almost but yet not completely dried to gold in the sun. If you looked
closely at the leaves, there were still streaks of grassy green.

I picked a stalk of wheat. A wooden stake
planted on the edge of the field said it was a variety called Red Wing. This, it would
turn out, was the variety in the sack of flour I got from Joe Vanderliet. Up close, a
wheat plant looks like a particularly buff and muscular grass, handsome, but perhaps
just a little over the top, like a bodybuilder. The spike formed an intricate ladder of
seeds arranged around the stem in a stepped, herringbone pattern, each with its own
elegant golden
needle reaching for the sky. I rubbed the seed head
between my palms. The light jacket of chaff came free from the kernels and blew away,
leaving a small handful of seeds. I bit into one of the fresh kernels. It was still
slightly soft, and though not quite ripe it already tasted wheaty and sweet. The
complexities and possibilities contained within this inconspicuous speck, this seed,
were hard to imagine, but there they were: everything needed to produce a wheat plant.
And much more than that. With enough of these seeds, and the knowledge of how to process
them into bread, you had most of what is needed to grow a person. Or for that matter a
civilization.

From where I stood, the field stretched west
to the bluish ridge of the Coast Range, a shimmering blond avenue of lawn. If you stand
in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it’s not hard to
imagine you’re looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight
brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat.
But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.

Consider, just for a moment, the everyday
proximity of death. No, not the swerve of the oncoming car or the bomb in the baby
carriage. I’m thinking more of the bloom of yeast on the ripe fruit, patiently
waiting for a breach in its skin so that it might invade and decompose its sweet flesh.
Or the lactobacillus loitering on the cabbage leaf for the same purpose. We, too, carry
around invisible microbial shadows: the
Brevibacterium
breeding in the saline
damp between our toes, or the enterococci lurking in the coiled dark of the intestine.
Everything that lives, it seems, must play host to the germ of its own dissolution.
Whether a fungus or a bacterium, these invisibles come wielding precisely the right kit
of enzymes to take apart, molecule by molecule, life’s most intricate structures,
reducing them, ourselves included, to simple foods for themselves and other living and
incipient beings.