A Connection to the Past
The more bread I bake, the more I fall in love with the ancient and heritage grains. Now, there is nothing wrong with simply grabbing a bag of run-of-the-mill bread flour - that was certainly how I made my first loaves - but I’ve always been a bit too curious for my own good. It was the fruits and vegetables that first piqued my interest. We’ve really kicked our gardening into a new gear this year, and we’ve been pouring over seed catalogs and nursery websites. Its amazing how many varieties there are of everything. What we see in a grocery store is just the tip of the iceberg, and the varieties that we do see there tend to be selected for aesthetics, ease of transport, yield, etc., with flavor far down the list of traits that make something a commercial success. Home gardeners, of course, don’t have such limitations, and can grow the sorts of heritage varietals that have long fallen out of favor with commercial growers, trading yield and effort for flavor and quality.
Having had my eyes opened to the limitations of the grocery store produce section, I started to wonder about the baking aisle too. After all, flour is essentially a dried and milled berry. In all the bread books that I started with, the quality of the flour was deemed essential. And yet there was very little about what to look for in flour to know it was high-quality. The prevailing wisdom from those esteemed bakers seemed to be to find a flour brand that worked and stick to it, with nothing about the wheat that went into making that flour. But I didn’t want to work with just a high-quality flour, I wanted to understand what went into it, what the history of it was, and how different flours would taste. I soon learned about the ancient grains, which were the first domesticated crops, and the heritage varietals of wheat from before the industrialization of agriculture. It was fascinating to me. I love the idea of baking bread with methods and ingredients that have been used for centuries or millennia.
Sourdough made with Turkey Red wheat flour
Lately I’ve been experimenting a lot with Turkey Red wheat flour, a Ukrainian heritage variety first introduced to America in the 1870’s. It has a wonderful rich and grassy aroma, and I’ve been trying to find the best way to really show it off. I’ve developed a pretty simple sourdough recipe that uses it in the levain that makes for a lovely fluffy bread, with just the right amount of whole wheat flavor. I like to think I’m bringing a bit of the flavor of the late nineteenth century to my table. Because lets be honest, while the technological advancements of the modern world have resulted in quantifiable improvements (longer life-expectancies, lower infant mortality, less starvation, etc.), they have also caused an increasing disconnect with our own history. I like to think that adding a touch of the old ways into our daily lives, whether it be baking (or eating) a heritage flour bread, or growing some of our own vegetables, or even just mending a shirt instead of throwing it, can help anchor us to a slower, less commercial time.
Until next time,
