The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (51 page)

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 push 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.