Part 16 (2/2)
As soon as I heard about Community Grains, I knew there was one more field trip in my baking education. As a baker of white bread, I had had no need to make the acquaintance of a miller, much less a wheat farmer. Indeed, that was the great virtue of the white-flour economy: a baker could focus on bread and pretty much ignore the long and largely invisible food chain that delivered the white powder to his door. But to bake a great, or even a decent, loaf of whole-grain bread, I needed to know a little more about wheat and milling. And unless I was going to buy my own mill, I needed a source of good, fresh whole-wheat flour. So I made plans to travel to Woodland, to meet my wheat.
I would not have guessed that Joe Vanderliet, the proprietor of Certified Foods and the miller for Community Grains, is in his eighties, he is so robust. Six feet three and unbent, he has a full head of gray hair, piercing blue eyes, and a sly sidelong twinkle about him. Joe grew up in the Netherlands, and recalls several hungry years as a boy during the war. He bears a trace of a Dutch accent, as well as a courtly Old World manner that leavens, slightly, his forceful personality. In the 1950s, Joe landed in Minnesota, and went to work as a grain buyer for Archer Daniels Midland. In the 1960s he worked for Montana Flour Mills Company, which was later absorbed by ConAgra during the consolidation of the milling industry during the sixties and seventies. Joe Vanderliet is very much a product of the white flour industrial complex.
But in the 1980s he had his own conversion experience, a story that he has by now milled to a high degree of refinement. A miller from Australia visited the plant he ran for Montana Flour Mills Company in Oakland, a high-tech mill of which Vanderliet could not have been more proud. ”We had it all, a pneumatic system for moving the flour, state of the art everything. But this fellow looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Have you ever thought about the nutritional value of this white flour you're milling?'” Vanderliet hadn't, but from that moment, ”I could never leave the question alone.”
”Personally, you understand, I was doing very well. I was happy. I had the most beautiful mill in the world. I was an officer of the company. I had the credit cards and the Brooks Brothers suits. But no one in the industry ever talked about nutrition. We were throwing the most nutritious part of our product in the garbage! The mill run [the discarded bran and germ] was going to the feedlot.
”I came home at night to my wife and said, 'What in G.o.d's name are we selling? We are not selling nutrition. Just endosperm. If you could only see what we're doing to the wheat. We're selling garbage! This has got to stop.'
”Well, that was thirty years ago. I've been milling whole grains ever since.”
In 1992, Vanderliet gave up his comfortable perch in the milling industry to launch a start-up that would focus exclusively on whole grains. Today, Certified Foods operates one of the larger whole-grain mills in the country, in a sprawling warehouse building alongside the railroad tracks in Woodland. It took months of journalistic courts.h.i.+p before he would consent to let me visit; in fact, Certified's mill proved harder to get into than the Wonder Bread factory. But eventually Joe relented, on the condition I agree to some ”ground rules,” which he never actually specified. Vanderliet is extremely secretive about his milling methods and worried, or at least professed to be, that I would somehow spill the proprietary beans to the compet.i.tion.
He need not have worried. Only another miller could have toured his plant and understood the first thing about what was going on deep inside all those freshly painted tan steel contraptions. Since the millstones and rollers are encased in steel and the flour moves between them in sealed pneumatic tubes, just about every step in the milling process takes place out of sight. What seemed distinctive about Vanderliet's operation is that the grain went through a multistep milling process that partakes of both traditional and modern technologies. So, after being milled whole on stone, the grain is pa.s.sed through a roller mill and a hammer mill. (This is a chamber in which the grain is thrown against a rough surface to further refine it.) These extra steps allow Certified to produce a more finely granulated whole-grain flour than a stone mill alone could produce without overheating it. The extra steps may also increase the shelf life of the flour by sealing the volatile germ within a coat of starch-but this is only a theory. As we walked through the plant, Vanderliet explained over the pounding din what was in his view the most important feature of his milling: ”We keep the whole seed intact throughout the entire process.
”You cannot fractionate the seed without ruining the flour. As soon as you separate the bran from the germ, that's it, it's all over: The germ will turn rancid. Its nutrition will be lost. What you have to understand-write this down!-is that nature made a perfect package when it made the seed, all the parts working together in a living system. So, for example, there are antioxidant compounds in the bran that protect the oils in the germ from oxidizing. But only if they are kept together! Once you break apart the seed, you can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” He pointed at my notebook. ”Write that down.”
This was the key to good whole-grain flour. And this, according to Vanderliet, is the reason that the big mills can never produce it, since their roller mills separate the seed into its component parts at the first break. Yet as soon as the germ is separated from its antioxidant protector, it begins to deteriorate. That's why, according to Vanderliet, most big millers routinely leave out the germ when they reconst.i.tute whole-grain flours. When I asked for proof of this claim-which if true means that most of what is sold as whole wheat is actually nothing of the kind-he brought me into the mill's control room to meet Roger Bane, his chief engineer. Joe hired Roger away from General Mills, which until recently operated a mill in Vallejo. Roger confirmed Vanderliet's claim: ”The germ is too troublesome to deal with, so we just got rid of it.” That troublesome germ may const.i.tute only a tiny fraction of the wheat seed, but happens to contain a whole suite of valuable nutrients-omega-3s, vitamin E, folic acid, and more-along with most of the flavor and aroma of wheat. (When I contacted General Mills for comment, I received an unsigned e-mail stating that ”by law, whole wheat flour must contain all three parts of the wheat berry” and that while ”it is true that the germ portion shortens the shelf life of the flour ... it must be included, as it is in ours.”)
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 relations.h.i.+p 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 b.a.l.l.s 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, preroller mill, the kind of flour in the painting by emile 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 Inst.i.tute 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 gra.s.s 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 nouris.h.i.+ng and delicious to eat-included. I am no maestro, no white thumb yet, but my bread is getting tastier, and airier, all the time.
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