“Which was the worthier technological achievement, the moon landing or the invention of bread? The bake oven or the nuclear reactor? Only a fool would hesitate to answer.
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It is current fashion to hate on bread. In the case of loaves entombed in plastic bags on the grocery store shelves, this distain is justified. What is sold as “wheat” bread (implied to be a healthier option) is often as vapid as that gluey white stuff with the primary colored circles on it. The only difference is some caramel color is added to the other dough conditioners, leavening agents, and preservatives. Even legitimate “whole wheat” bread has fallen far from the paradigm. If you are fortunate to have an artisan baker in your neighborhood, you can get much closer to a real loaf. There is still a gap between the finest commercial loaf and what is possible, however.
Contemporary nutritional science has identified wheat, and more specifically gluten, as the source of many systemic ills including leaky gut syndrome, inflammation, and arterial plaque. Controversy abounds on this subject. Personally, I could remove bread from my life without hesitation, if we were just talking about the stuff in the grocery store. Conversely, you can have my sourdough when you pry it from my lightly floured, cold, dead fingers!
So, how do we arrive at a loaf of bread that is actually beyond nutritious and, in fact, poetic? As per usual, we have to go back in time, and find out how bread got lost. Lets set the way-back machine to the 1960’s. Before the discovery of gene splicing technology, the Big Ag boys used blunter means to adulterate plant genetics, in the hope of producing a new variation that would capture the interest of the market. Various chemical baths and gamma radiation were among the weapons used to corrupt the natural mutation frequency of plant seeds. The seeds were then germinated, and the results examined. In the case of wheat, cross breeding is a slow and laborious practice, as wheat is largely self-fertilizing. In other words, you can’t predictably cross the wheat with the heavier seed yield with the one that needs less water without hand pollinating each blossom and somehow isolating it from itself. Being myopic and greedy, these mad scientists were looking for greater profits, without regard for long term health ramifications. What was produced through the gamma radiation experiments was what came to be known as “improved wheat”. This new wheat yielded significantly higher bushel per acre results than the old strains, and had much higher gluten content. The structure of the gluten proteins was also mutated, creating something alien to the human digestive system. Another change that happened, along the way, is the method of harvest. Before mechanical farming, wheat was cut with a scythe, bundled and tied, and allowed to dry standing in the field. Once dry, it was threshed and winnowed, then ground between stones to produce flour. During the drying process, a brief fermentation occurred, as the center of the bundles dried more slowly than the outside. As fermentation typically has a beneficial effect on digestibility, it can be inferred that the removal of this step was at the cost of nutrient access and may be a factor in the modern wheat “toxicity”. Today, wheat is harvested with a combine that cuts the seed head, threshes and winnows all in one step. Additionally, though there is no “round-up ready” wheat currently on the market, some farmers have taken to soaking your wheat in this herbicide to hasten ripening. Nice that it is added right at the end, no? I recommend buying organic wheat flour, at the very least, for this reason.
There is no need to examine all of the chemical food additives mixed into modern bread. Each one serves some function of texture modification, shelf life extension, or appearance manipulation, and all are unnecessary in a decentralized food shed. Real bread is flour, water, yeast, and salt.
Then there’s the yeast… In the beginning, bread was flat. It was a paste of flour and water (with some salt, on a good day) that was baked on a hot stone. It was a desperation food. The Primary benefit of agriculture was a stable food supply that could be stored for times when game meat and foraged foods were scarce. As it just made sense to build one communal grain storage facility, rather than have a silo for each household, communities harvested together, and put their grain together for safe keeping. The epistemology of the word “Lord” comes from the keeper of the grain. You can’t tell me that the early grain keepers didn’t dole out an extra allotment of grain to that hot maiden with the sparkling eyes. This practice is the seed of government, corruption, banking, and many of the other mistakes that plague humanity to this day, but I digress… One day, someone forgot to cook the papier-mâché paste on the hot rock. Wild microbes found it, and started to eat it. Some of these were yeast spores. They ate the starches and sugars, and excreted ethanol and CO2. The gluten in the wheat trapped the gasses, and when our proto-chef got around to cooking this dough, something magical happened! It poofed, or “proofed” more accurately. Leavened bread was born. Now we had something that could spawn entire cultures. There are as many variations on this concept as there are ethnicities. Beer was born the same way, at roughly the same time. Eventually, brewers sold excess yeast to bakers. Then yeast was sold in cakes, or compressed yeast. These were highly perishable, so yeast cultures were dried to produce active dry yeast. This was pretty stable, but had to be rehydrated before use. Instant yeast is active dry yeast in smaller granules, with a higher percentage of living cells. Now we had a product that could be added straight to dough, yielding a puffy loaf in hours. Then we outsourced the baking of our bread to multi-national corporations. How convenient! At every one of these “advancements” quality suffered.
Bread and photo by AJ Carillo
So how radical can we get, when it comes to bread? It is early January 2017, as of this writing. In the spring, I plan to plant out a patch of pre-improved genetics wheat. I’ll keep you posted on that process and progress. In the fall, I will harvest it the old way, and grind it myself. In the mean time, I am developing a relationship with an old woman. A.J. Carillo, over at Deer Tree Farm gave me a 60 year-old sour dough starter, a few weeks back, and I am naturalizing myself to it. In the next post, I will detail my current method (which yielded the boules pictured above) and provide some details about cultures, and technique. Also, I will provide a dirt simple compromise recipe for a crusty artisanal bread that is nearly fool-prof, uses instant yeast, and requires no kneading. It is also fabulous, and better than a quick rise loaf, if not quite as cosmic as a long fermented sourdough.
Stay tuned…