Part 16 (1/2)

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.

At the conclusion of my tour the Hostess bakers gave me a few loaves, and on the drive up to Dave Miller's I sampled three types of neoWonder Bread. The Soft 100% Whole Wheat smelled strongly of yeast and mola.s.ses and was a shade darker than the whiteasWonder Bread ”Made with Whole Grain” loaf. The two loaves tasted equally sweet, which is to say very, and though the 100 percent whole wheat was not quite as cottony soft, I'm not sure I could have told them apart with my eyes closed. (Since I was driving, I decided to postpone that particular test.) My least favorite loaf was the Smart White, the one with the fiber equivalent of (but not the actual fiber from) 100 percent whole wheat. After an initial impression of sweetness, I registered several distinctly off flavors, probably from the cottonseed, wood pulp, and other nonwheat fibers and the minerals added to it-all the fibrous and rocky ”garbage” that Hostess had baked into it.

After a while, all the neoWonder Breads began to seem the same, and less like bread than nutrient delivery systems. Yet it isn't at all clear that such a reductive approach to nutrition-in which wheat seeds are broken down into their component parts and then rea.s.sembled along with other processed plant parts, some minerals, an additive or two derived from petroleum, and a ton of yeast to loft the whole deal-actually yields a healthy or even a healthier loaf of bread. These breads were really nutritional conceits, clever ways to work the words ”whole grain” or ”whole wheat” onto a package, now that those magic words const.i.tute an implied health claim. But the idea of whole grain in these products clearly counted for more than the reality, which Hostess treated as something to overcome, disguise, or merely allude to. These were notional breads, and eventually they turned to cotton in my mouth. I was reminded of Richard Bourdon's saliva test for good bread: Did a wad of it make your mouth water? These three flunked.

I had heard from Chad that Dave Miller had once owned a bakery called Wunder Brot, so when I showed up at the door to his bakery-basically a suite of rooms attached to his house, which was tucked into a lovely remote hillside in the Sierra Foothills, south and east of Chico-I presented him with a couple of loaves of late-model Wonder Bread. He looked slightly horrified, but managed a smile. A slender man in his late forties with a trim goatee, Dave was dressed in a crisp white pocket T-s.h.i.+rt and clogs. I wondered if this was the first plastic-bagged loaf of sliced bread ever to cross his threshold.

Miller's Bake House is a one-man show. It was a Thursday, and Dave was grinding wheat and mixing dough for his weekly bake the next morning. He kept one eye on the mill, a stone wheel encased in a handsomely crafted wooden cabinet made in Austria, and the other on his Artofex mixer, an old-timey, pink-painted contraption from Switzerland. A pair of steel arms moved lazily up and down through the bowl of wet flour, convincingly simulating the action of human hands kneading dough.

Dave Miller is an uncompromising baker, as fiercely devoted to whole grains and wet doughs and natural leavens as Richard Bourdon. (If not more so: Only one of his breads contains any white flour.) But compared with his voluble, flamboyant mentor, Miller comes across as very much the Protestant baker, spare with his p.r.o.nouncements and something of an ascetic. Though he used to own bakeries and manage employees (including Chad Robertson), for the past seven years he has stripped his vocation down to its Th.o.r.eauvian essentials: one man, some sacks of wheat, a couple of machines, and an oven. Miller's Bake House is almost completely off the grid: Solar panels power the mill and the cold room where he r.e.t.a.r.ds his loaves, and the Italian deck oven is fired with wood that he chops himself. I asked if the wood imparted flavor to the bread. ”It's not about the flavor. It's that I would rather not be a party to wars for oil.”

The afternoon I visited, Miller was agonizing over whether to add a pinch of as...o...b..c acid-often used to strengthen low-protein flours-to his Kamut dough. Dave disdained additives on principle, but the crop of Kamut (an ancient variety of durum wheat) that a farmer had grown for him had come in weak-low in protein-this year, and the loaves were somewhat depressed as a result. The as...o...b..c acid promised to help the dough hold a bit more air, but adding it meant veering ever so slightly from ”the right path,” as the Miller's Bake House Web site describes his approach. Short of landing at a bakery on Alpha Centauri, I could not have traveled farther from the Hostess plant, where as...o...b..c acid is one of the more natural ingredients in use. ”I have met the bread monk,” I jotted in my notebook.

Dave took me into the back room to see his mill. It was a tall wooden contraption with a hopper on top that held fifty pounds of wheat at a time, feeding it gradually through an aperture that opened onto the sandwich of revolving stones inside. Though ”gradually” does not do justice to the glacial pace of this machine. The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if pa.s.sing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase ”nose to the grindstone”: a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of warm, tan flour that slowly acc.u.mulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a whiff. Freshly milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I'd read about the etymology of the word ”flour”-that it is the flower, or best part, of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled delicious.

That whiff of fresh flour delivered a little epiphany. Up to now, I had been more or less indifferent to whole wheat. I liked it okay, probably more than most, but I ate it mainly because it was better for me than white bread, not because it tasted better. So you might say that I, too, liked the idea of whole grain more than the actual experience, just like the bakers and food scientists at Hostess. Though I didn't mind the coa.r.s.eness, or the density, even the best whole-grain breads usually tasted as though they were being stingy with their flavor, holding something back. I hadn't yet tried Dave's bread, but the fragrance of his flour made me think I had probably never really experienced the full potential of whole-grain wheat, something I now suddenly very much wanted to do.

Dave milled his own grain because that was the only way he could buy wheat directly from farmers and guarantee the freshness of his flour. ”The moment the seed is opened up is the moment of its greatest potential. As soon as it's milled, it begins to oxidize, losing the energy that could be nouris.h.i.+ng us. That's also the moment of maximum flavor before it begins to fade.”

Dave's foremost concern as a baker has always been with health. His own ”eureka moment” came in the early eighties at a bakery in Minneapolis, with a taste of a 100 percent whole-grain bread. ”One bite of that bread and I could feel my whole body respond. It just felt so right.” Extracting the full nutritional value from wheat dictates every step of his baking process, yet Dave sees no trade-off between health and flavor, and in fact believes that the flavor of bread is a good indicator of its nutritional quality. In this, grains are a little like fruit, the fragrant ripeness of which signifies they have arrived at their nutritional peak. But, unlike fruit, grains also need to be processed with care-properly fermented and baked-in order to achieve peak taste and nutrition. For Dave that means a wet dough to thoroughly cook the grain, a long, slow fermentation, and a thorough bake in a hot oven.

Dave invited me to spend the night so I could watch the whole twenty-four-hour process unfold from start to finish. When I dragged myself from bed the following morning at five, he had already been at it for a couple of hours, firing up the oven and shaping loaves that had risen in the walk-in cooler overnight. Dave's doughs were by far the wettest I'd seen (up to 104 percent hydration*), and he handled them as gently as newborns, turning them in their buckets even less frequently than Chad did. Dave was long accustomed to working by himself (”I like baking alone; it's such an intense sensory thing”), but by the second day he was willing to let me handle his babies, showing me how to shape the batards and pan breads. Some of these doughs were so wet that to keep them from sticking you dipped your hands in water rather than flour. It was monastically quiet in the bakery as we worked, still dark outside, and the smells were captivating: malty and floral and, as soon as Dave began feeding loaves into the oven, irresistible.

But Dave wouldn't let me taste any bread until it had properly cooled and ”set,” so I couldn't have a taste until I was already on the road home. The warm loaves filled the car with the aroma I had smelled in the mill room. Don't tell Dave, but I was able to hold off only as long as it took to steer my car out of his driveway.

The bread was a revelation. I felt as though I was tasting wheat for the very first time. The flavor held nothing back; it was rich, nutty, completely obliging in its sweetness. The crumb was moist and glossy. I ate a whole loaf before I got to the highway.

But the bread was not perfect. There could have been much more contrast between crumb and crust, which wasn't crisp at all, and the loaves were broad and low-slung. ”You're always fighting gravity with whole grain,” Dave had said earlier that morning, as he withdrew from the oven a wooden peel laden with loaves that looked a tad depressed. ”But I don't mind a dense loaf if it's moist.” Dave had accepted the trade-off: flavor and nutrition for volume. A sacrifice of air.

Dave Miller's bread was delicious, but not everything I'd dreamed of in a whole-grain loaf. Yet what I tasted and smelled in his bakery made me determined to bake with whole grains from now on-to see if I couldn't get some of those flavors in my bread, but with a tougher crust and a lot more air. Baking white bread suddenly seemed boring. I'd had a glimpse, a taste, of what was possible, and it was so much more than I'd ever imagined. A good whole-grain loaf became my grail, and I spent the next few months baking 100 percent whole-wheat loaves one after another.

That first month, a great many worthy brown bricks came out of my oven, loaves decidedly more virtuous than tasty. The G-forces at work in my oven had never seemed so oppressive, as if I were suddenly baking on another, much larger planet. I struggled for weeks with sourness. The whole-grain flour seemed to overstimulate my sourdough culture, inspiring prodigious outpourings of acid from the bacteria while quickly tuckering out the yeasts. I wasn't sure if I should attribute the anemic oven spring I was experiencing to exhausted yeasts or to the sharp bran knives slas.h.i.+ng my gluten to ribbons.

I was still using Chad Robertson's basic recipe, subst.i.tuting whole-grain flour for white, and soon realized I needed to make some adjustments. I read that since bran softens as it absorbs water, those little knives could be somewhat dulled with a wetter dough and a longer rest before mixing. So I stepped up to a 90 percent hydration and extended the autolyse to an hour. The wetter mix seemed to soften the bran, yet left me with me a dough that proved trickier to shape and build tension into-yet another cause of lousy oven spring. Dave Miller's words-”You're always fighting gravity with whole grains”-rang in my ears after every one of those disappointing bakes. Yet I wasn't quite prepared to give up on air.

Even as I struggled, though, I began to suspect that the conventional view that there is an inevitable trade-off between whole grains and great bread-a view accepted by everyone from the food scientists at Hostess to any number of gifted artisa.n.a.l bakers-might not necessarily be true. More likely, we'd come to regard the trade-off as inevitable simply because it was so much easier to bake good white bread than whole grain. From any bag of white flour and packet of yeast in the supermarket it was possible to bake a sweet and impressively airy loaf of bread. This was the whole point and promise of white flour and commercial yeast: They were standardized commodities that behaved in predictable ways. But try to make whole-grain bread in a system that has been organized around white flour-using reconst.i.tuted whole-grain flour, fast-acting yeasts, white-flour recipes, dry doughs, etc.-and the bread will reliably disappoint: earthbound, crumbling, stingy with flavor. Yet another advertis.e.m.e.nt for white bread.

To bake a truly great whole-grain loaf would take more than a good recipe. It would mean getting out from under the whole white-flour regime, as Dave Miller had done when he began working directly with farmers and milling their grain fresh. It would mean recognizing that whole-grain bread has a system of its own, or at least it once did, before the advent of the roller mill and commercial yeast and mechanized baking. That system was built around stone mills to grind wheat whole, access to fresh flour, natural leavens, tons of time, and a human culture, or body of knowledge, that understood how to manage the whole process and its numberless contingencies.

If this already seems like too much to hope for, I could think of more. Ideally, a whole-grain regimen would offer varieties of wheat that had been bred for something other than a giant super-white endosperm and a hard coat of bran. And, also ideally, this wheat would figure in a much shorter food chain, one where local mills bought directly from nearby farmers so that bakers could get flour that has been freshly milled from the most desirable varieties of wheat.

To view the problem this way is to despair of ever baking a truly great whole-grain bread. The white flour industrial complex so completely dominates the food landscape (including even the artisa.n.a.l corner of that landscape) that to wish for anything substantially different seems, well, wishful and nostalgic. To bake the bread I wanted, I didn't just need a better recipe. I needed a whole different civilization.

But a couple of stray facts gave me just enough hope to keep on baking. The first came when I noticed that the price of Soft 100% Whole Wheat Wonder Bread at my local Safeway was $4.59-not cheap. How was it that Dave Miller could sell his incomparably more delicious and nouris.h.i.+ng organic, freshly milled, long-fermented loaves at the farmers' market for $5.00, only 41 cents more than Hostess charged? Perhaps the industrial bread system might not be as indomitable as it appears, at least when it came to meeting the demand for whole-grain bread. In the middle of an economy organized around white flour, whole-grain flour and all the technology required to make it acceptable to the consumer is expensive. The second encouraging fact was that several of the most gifted bakers in the Bay Area, including Chad Robertson at Tartine, Steve Sullivan at Acme, Craig Ponsford, and Mike Zakowski, were at work developing new whole-grain breads, many of them 100 percent whole grain. So something was in the air-the first stirrings, perhaps, of a cultural revival. Even the newsletter of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, which for years had been openly hostile to whole grain, was beginning to question the white-flour orthodoxy and to s.h.i.+ne a flattering light on bakers, like Ponsford, who had rejected it.

The last encouraging fact was scattered evidence that a local whole-grain economy might also be stirring here and there. New grain farmers and millers were popping up in New England and the Pacific Northwest and even in my own backyard, part of the national movement to supply a growing demand for local food. I talked to a wheat breeder in Was.h.i.+ngton State who was working to develop varieties better suited to whole-grain milling and baking. He mentioned that he had been in touch with new local grain projects all over the country.

And then I heard about a new enterprise called Community Grains, based near me in Oakland, that had started selling stone-ground whole-wheat flour grown in California. I didn't even know you could grow wheat in California. But it had apparently been an important crop in the nineteenth century, before the big irrigation projects, because it can be planted in the fall and then watered by the winter rains. Community Grains was selling wheat that was being grown by a group of farmers in the Sacramento Valley and milled in Woodland at a small company called Certified Foods.