In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (21 page)

While Nightengale went on—regaling me with details about cousins in Germany, where the Mennonites originated; tales of starvation on the Ukrainian steppe; and wheat and religion and the promise of a new land—I mentioned in passing that my father’s family, the Fromartzes, had hailed from Kiev, which is also in Ukraine. They were Jewish immigrants who ended up in Brooklyn. Nightengale perked up at this. It was as if a bond had been forged right there over the kitchen table. He focused his steely eyes on me, one religiously persecuted immigrant offspring to another, and I knew right then this trip would be worth it.

His grandfather broke sod with a steam engine and plow, then planted a quarter section, or 250 acres, with Turkey Red wheat. Three generations on, the farm had expanded to nearly 3,000 acres, and had followed the wave of modern agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and whatever new wheat breed was released, planting wheat year after year. By the 1980s, though, the conventional regime was taking a toll, in compacted soil that couldn’t hold water, in stunted plants, and in the need for ever more external nutrients because the soil was being mined. The crop was sold into the commodities market, which meant “we’d take the grain to the feedlots and they’d feed it to livestock, or it would get exported,” he said. Farmers were under pressure from rising debt, sour land deals, and big equipment purchases. Then grain prices plunged in the early 1980s. A huge number of farmers left the land.

“You need to remember, in the late nineteenth century in western Kansas, there were more people living here than there are today,” he said. Nightengale responded by returning to farming the way his grandparents did, rotating crops, seeking out manure and compost to rebuild the depleted topsoil. He avoided chemicals. It was cheaper, after all, and the stuff was toxic. By the late 1980s, these practices began to pay off in higher grain weights and better grain quality, but Nightengale said the wheat wasn’t reaping anything extra in the commodities market. So Nightengale and several other farmers following a similar path started to peddle their grain at natural foods trade shows, where buyers had begun to ask about organic whole grain flour. Seeing an opportunity, the farmers, who were nearly organic already, decided to start a flour mill. Nightengale told me they thought it might be a way to keep young people—their kids—from leaving the area.

In a corner of a trailer, which housed Heartland’s grain testing operation—overseen by his son—Nightengale reached under a table and pulled out a small eight-inch stone mill. “That was the first mill,” he said. It didn’t last long. They gradually expanded into the operation I visited that day—a huge building housing grain cleaning machines, a refurbished late-nineteenth-century roller mill, and a few giant stone mills. The plant was noisy, because every machine inside vibrated, shook, whirled, and blew. They were everywhere, so it was hard to hear Nightengale’s full description of the operation, but we pressed on, winding between the equipment, up narrow metal staircases, traversing steel balconies and around pipes that ran this way and that all through the building.

Near the beginning of the process was a gravity table that shook the grain over a screen at a slight angle, allowing the seed to fall down a grain chute and separating the rocks, sticks, and chaff which were channeled off to another bin. “This is exactly the way the Egyptians did it,” Nightengale said. Well, not exactly. Where two people used to shake a screen to winnow the seed, now there was a vigorous, noisy machine to do the work. From there, the grain flew through a dizzying number of cleaners and blowers and a magnetic chamber to remove any metal; it ran through pneumatic tubes circling the ceiling. Before it entered the yard-long cylinders of the roller mill, the grain was also “tempered,” or moistened, several hours so that the bran would more easily split from the endosperm. Once inside the mill, grain passed between two steel rollers spinning in opposite directions, crushing the kernel and removing the bran. The grain was then sucked through a vibrating sifter and shot down to another set of rollers and ground again. At the end of the process, in which the flour passed through seven pairs of rollers in a matter of seconds, there was a bin of white flour, and others filled with wheat bran and germ.

But that was only part of the operation. Other batches of dry grain were channeled to thirty-inch stone mills, where the kernels were ground together rather than separated as in the roller mill, making whole wheat flour. For one product, the flour was bolted—that is, the milled whole wheat flour passed through a fine rotary screen so the coarsest bran flecks could be removed. Heartland calls this Golden Buffalo flour, which consists of only 82 percent of the kernel rather than 100 percent as in whole wheat. “Bolted flour” has been valued for millennia, because it’s a kind of halfway point to whole wheat, containing some of the bran and germ, but not all of it. You lose some of the nutritional benefits but it’s less assertive than whole wheat flour and may yield greater loft. This so-called
high-extraction flour is common in Europe
, though hard to find in the United States, unless you seek it out from specialty mills or professional suppliers. In supermarkets, home bakers are left with basic choices: either roller-milled white flour, which has no bran or germ (and consists of about 72 percent of the kernel), or 100 percent whole wheat.

Turning a corner, Nightengale hollered, “We’ve probably got one of the biggest collections of machine belts in western Kansas.” He pointed proudly to row upon row of rubber belts aligned on a wall for the milling machines. These machines were refurbished, bought from outmoded mills that the grain giants had shuttered and sold off as scrap. Heartland’s Allis-Chalmers roller mill was manufactured in the 1890s, then partially rebuilt in the 1940s. But after Nightengale bought it, the rollers were stripped, sanded, and reassembled from the inside out. Two-story-high grain silos that looked like rocket boosters came from an Archer Daniels Midland mill that had recently shut down. “The hardest part was getting them here,” he said. Once they were erected on a concrete slab, his team welded a metal building together around the outside of the silos so Heartland had a warehouse to store flour. Everything he showed me had been bought used, overhauled, rebuilt, and recycled. Nothing was new, except maybe those machine belts.

“You have the talent to do this kind of thing?” I asked, surveying this vast arena of secondhand machines, gizmos, sifters, and even buildings they had built by hand. “Well, we’re all farmers and farmers have to be good at a lot of things,” he replied. Nightengale had learned it all on the job, from textbooks, or from talking to milling experts, with trial and error. What drove him forward were bakers who wanted superlative flour and the local farmers who wanted to sell it to them.

Among those flours was Turkey Red wheat, which was brought to Heartland in 2009 by Thom Leonard, a baker who had a passion for the grain. Leonard told me he had first come across it in 1977, when the wheat’s centenary was celebrated in Kansas. Leonard then found the few farmers who still grew the wheat and added it to the lineup at his highly regarded WheatFields Bakery in Lawrence, Kansas. More recently, he worked with farmers and Heartland to expand its cultivation and milling. But it was still an extremely rare crop in the state, owing in part to its lower yield. Leonard has since moved on to Athens, Georgia, where he has opened Independent Baking Co., but he still has a Turkey Red loaf in his lineup.

Since it’s an “identity preserved” flour, Heartland doesn’t blend its stone ground Turkey Red flour with any other type of wheat to correct for the natural variations that may appear from year to year. Randy George, who owns the Red Hen Baking Co. in Middlesex, Vermont, and who has baked with the flour for several years, told me he routinely alters his Turkey Red dough, because the flour varies so much. It sounds a lot like premodern flour, before the onset of specialized wheat breeding and blending created highly consistent products.

When I tried baking with it, that’s exactly how I found it. The bolted Turkey Red flour was more tricky to work with than, say, Heartland’s Golden Buffalo flour, whose gluten develops quite predictably. The Turkey Red required much gentler handling to avoid ripping the skin of the dough and it was quite extensible, or stretchy. But I found that if I didn’t make the mistake of letting the loaf rise too long, it would hold its shape nicely. The lactic and acetic acids in the starter definitely helped strengthen the dough. The loaf didn’t end up as a hard brick, nor did it have the assertive tannins you sometimes find in 100 percent whole wheat bread. It had a light internal crumb and the mild hint of caramel, which, with the slight acidic punch of the sourdough, made for a pleasant taste. It was, in short, quite good flour, and soon I was adding Turkey Red flour to my baguettes, making a long, rustic-looking loaf with a single slash down the length of the loaf.

 • • • 

L
ater that day, on our way to visit one of Heartland’s farmers, we drove out past a huge Cargill feedlot, with tens of thousands of black cows being fattened for slaughter fenced in on a muddy, stinking hill. A massive pile of corn feed two stories high and as big as two football fields lined the side of the road. Then, we came upon the cows’ inevitable by-product: row after row of cow manure cooking into compost, the heavy scent wafting down the road long before we approached. I had never seen the heartland of industrial agriculture, but you can’t miss it once you arrive. It’s not only the eighteen-wheelers hauling animals, feed, grain, and hay down narrow highways between fields of wheat but also feedlots filled with cattle and the unmistakable smell of their waste.

We drove into the middle of the vast composting operation, and while we were taking in the view of these giant, six-foot-tall rows of manure, a worker released a hose and water spewed out down the roadway toward Nightengale’s truck. The fierce wind hurled the water toward us, now mixing with the thick muck of manure on the ground, splattering the windshield with a wave of brown gunk. Nightengale turned on the wipers. “Guess I’ll have to get a carwash now,” he said. We turned around and roared out of that mess, the stench filling the cab of the truck.

But as noxious as this feedlot manure was, at least this animal waste would be composted and spread on wheat and corn fields as an alternative to chemical fertilizers, rebuilding the soil in which these crops grew. This isn’t an endorsement of these factory livestock farms—which traffic in disease and rely on the copious use of antibiotics—but I can think of no better way to dispose of their vast hills of manure once they are there.

We drove over to Karlan Koehn’s farm, which Nightengale said was “nearby.” In farm country, such terms are relative. About forty minutes later we arrived. Koehn’s father, brothers, and their kids were all gathered around a tank-size combine that had broken down, interrupting the corn harvest. It was hot, the yard full of flies. Koehn apologized that he couldn’t take me for a spin in the machine, so instead brought me inside a large barn where women in white-and-blue bonnets brought in trays of sweet iced tea and homemade oatmeal cookies. We talked about the wheat he grew, which he was gradually shifting to organic methods, though it accounted for only 280 acres of a 4,000-acre farm. He was drawn in, he said, because “it seemed like our weeds were getting more resistant to the herbicides.” Plus, it wasn’t a sacrifice. He told me one field of irrigated organic wheat yielded 100 bushels an acre, topping his conventional fields and double the state average. This result tugs at the often-stated narrative that organic farming methods, which eschew chemical fertilizers and pesticides, always yield far less. Koehn, who was by no means a die-hard organic farmer, attributed the results to the use of compost, but he still found the bountiful yield surprising and perhaps an aberration.

There was another, more subtle reason he was moving in this direction. “It was intriguing to have a quality product, grown on our farm, being consumed by people and milled by our neighbors,” he said. The alternative was to send the wheat to the grain elevator, and from there into the global food chain. “We never know where it ends up,” he said. So, even here, in this great expanse of farmland, among the most productive wheat fields in the world, the farmer yearned for a personal connection, though he could never be “local” in the sense of the farmer who sells at my farmers’ market in Washington, because local demand would never match his vast supply.

 • • • 

K
oehn wasn’t growing Turkey Red wheat, but rather the modern varieties released by university breeders and then put into production by seed companies. Much more productive than the old wheat varieties, such as Turkey Red, these new wheats seemed like a winning formula, but then, in the 1970s, scientists began to warn that these plants were awfully similar to one another, narrowing genetic variability. By breeding this highly productive wheat and then planting it in widespread monocultures, a basic food staple might become vulnerable to a devastating epidemic. It was the same old worry that had bedeviled farmers for millennia. The insurance policy for the food supply—plant diversity—was missing.

A wake-up call
came in 1970, when an epidemic of southern corn leaf blight struck the hybrid corn crop in the United States with intense speed. Worried about the implications of such a knockout blow for other staple foods, researchers at the National Academy of Sciences acknowledged that there had also been a “genetic erosion” in wheat. “The breeder, who means well, is destroying by his actions the genetic base for a new generation of varieties,” one researcher wrote.

This risk of vanishing germplasm results anytime breeders select a chosen few from a broad population of plants. Certain plants may exhibit robust disease resistance, a larger kernel, reduced risk of lodging (in which the plant droops over so is more difficult to harvest), earlier maturity, and the like. But if these plant selections are cultivated in a monoculture, pests and diseases can evolve to attack them. Once the varieties lose resistance, they become, in effect, an all-you-can-eat buffet for the newly evolved pest.