Wheatavore

Wheat flour, like sugar and salt, is a thing so readily available processed that it’s hard for even a committed locavore and foodie to think in terms of growing wheat in the back yard. What’s more, wheat  seems – despite its prevalence – to be a picky, demanding crop, as needy as a toddler close to naptime. Fertilizer, sunshine, special equipment to harvest are all necessary, and then with all the work will there even be enough to bake a loaf of bread? If you have an acre of land, you can get 1,381 loaves of bread  – enough for about three loaves each day of the year, with some flour left over for cookies and pies. For the average family, half an acre should be enough.

People have begun to test the limits of wheat cultivation and are having successes that suggest there might be a future in grow-your-own. After all, wheat stalks are quieter than the urban chickens that are so popular these days, and less likely to run into local zoning codes. Thousands of varieties of wheat have been hybridized to grow in many climates and soils – dwarf wheats, wheats resistant to diseases, and wheats for cold weather.

Storing grain is relatively simple. One website suggests five-gallon plastic buckets with tight lids are ideal. Buying a mill to grind your own wheat is as easy as searching the Internet for home flour mills. There are dozens of possibilities, ranging from hand-cranked to high-speed electric mills. The website eHow has suggestions for how to make your decision.

Photo of Alaska wheat at the Alaska State Fair, August 27, 2011.

Not everyone has the half-acre required to grow enough wheat for the family for the year, or wants to go to that amount of work. But many farmers are finding it profitable to grow wheat again in fields that were devoted to other crops for the past hundred or more years. Many farmers with small acreage are growing wheat to feed livestock, or to supply consumers with locally-produced flours, making it easier to find local flour without having to grow your own. From Alaska to California and the southern states, amber waves of grain are brightening vistas and supplying local mills and households with custom-ground choices for every kind of cooking.

Immortal wheat

    A collection of poetry, religious texts and notes about wheat:


Chicago
". . .  Hog butcher for the world
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads . . ." Carl Sandberg (1916)


from The Bacchae


"Mankind possesses two supreme blessings, First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth -- whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man." Euripides (circa 407 B.C.)


The Song of Solomon, 7:2


"Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies."


From Deuteronomy, 8:3, 8:7 - 9:
" . . .  man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live. . . . 7 For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of olive-trees and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it;. . . "


Centuries of Meditations


"The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting." Thomas Traherne


The Merchant of Venice


"Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing . . .  His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall see all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search."  I, i, 114 William Shakespeare


Weevily Wheat, a folk song


Weevily Wheat

From all over. This version collected by RG from an "heroic
monotone" named Alan Shulman in 1953.

I don't want none of your weevily wheat
I don't want none of your barley,
I want some flour and half an hour
To bake a cake for Charlie.

Charlie's neat and Charlie's sweet
And Charlie, he's a dandy,
He loves to hug and kiss the girls
And feed them sugar candy.

Over the river and through the trees
Over the river to Charlie,
Over the river to feed my sheep
On buckwheat cakes and barley.
Coffee grows on white oak trees
Rivers flow with brandy,
I've got a pretty little blue-eyed gal
Sweet as 'lasses candy.

Mama's gone to Harlem town
Papa's gone to Dover,
Sister's wore her slippers out
A-kickin Charlie over.

Take her by her lily-white hand
Lead her like a pigeon,
Make her dance the weevily wheat
'Til she loses her religion.

Guest Post: "Gold from Sicily" by In Place

A fellow blogger has graciously shared her recent post from In Place about wheat in Sicily.

14SundayAug 2011

Posted by Antonia in Books and Authors, Sea Glass

≈ Leave a Comment

Mary Taylor Simeti’s Pomp and Sustenance – Twenty-five Centuries of Sicilian Food mixes historical research, empirical observation,  photographs of art, bits of literature, and recipes in a way that evokes the colors and smells and densities of life on the island of Sicily.  This book and her others remind me somewhat of the work of Claudia Roden but they are more immediately readable as something other than cookbooks.  Her writing also seems somehow tied to the work of the great historian of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel.  She might be Braudel’s assistant, working on a detail of his grand tapestry.  Her writing mix in this work and elsewhere always makes me want to leave immediately for the island.

To follow one thread:  Wheat has been Sicily’s gold.  Since ancient times, the island’s land has been able to produce in abundance a highly-valued, hard-grained durum winter wheat that is still the basis for the best pasta.  Sicily was the granary of the Roman Empire.  Simeti traces the role of wheat in Sicily’s history – how its cultivation led to the establishment of the vast estates called latifundia, which in turn became for centuries structures for repression and exploitation of the peasantry.   She weaves into this stories from her husband’s family and from her own experiences during her decades of life on the island, including details of stoves, utensils, baking routines, costs,   Interspersed are the recipes, including one for pane rimacinato, a bread that uses semolina, the finely ground flour made from the durum wheat.  There’s a photograph of the bread – a round loaf with a hard crust.

The book was originally published by Knopf, with a paperback edition issued by Ecco Press.  The most recent edition seems to have been in 1998.  It’s available from used book dealers via Amazon.

Wheat markets and weather, August 10, 2011

      Amid discussions of oil and pork, corn and soybeans, one evening market report found good news today in the wheat market:


"For wheat, the briefing is viewed as less crucial, causing an average move of $0.14 a bushel, with much of the US crop already in the barn by now.

'Still some optimism'

And, indeed, the grain managed movement denied its peers, in an upward direction too, helped by its newly-rediscovered competitiveness against Russian wheat on export markets.

"There is still some optimism regarding wheat exports and that has supported wheat today," Mr Holaday said.

Furthermore, while some dry southern US wheat areas have received much-needed rain, the western wheat areas received nothing", leaving winter wheat growers facing the prospect of poor soil conditions for planting.

And the Rosario Grain Exchange pegged Argentina's wheat crop at 12.5m tonnes, lower than the current USDA forecast of 15m tonnes, taking some of the sting out of another upgrade for the French crop, this time from official farm bureau FranceAgriMer.

Big tender 

There was also evidence of demand in wheat, with Saudi Arabia tendering for 660,000 tonnes of hard wheat.

Chicago (soft red winter) wheat for September added 2.0% to $6.85 a bushel, while Kansas (hard red winter) wheat for the same month closed up 2.9% at $7.85 a bushel.

Minneapolis hard red spring wheat gained 2.5% to $8.37 ¼ a bushel.

In Europe, Paris wheat for November added 0.8% to E195.00 a tonne, with London's November lot gaining 0.8% to £162.00 a tonne."

Websites for wheat growers

     The world from the perspective of a wheat farmer often looks very different than from the perspective of someone who bakes now and then. Websites such as the Oklahoma Wheat Growers' Association (http://www.owga.org/index.cfm) publish periodic newsletters  that I've been checking out. One link (http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do;jsessionid=547D0079642060C62F1DC690D312AEB7.agfreejvm2?contentId=70013&parentId=-1) analyzes the possible effects of weather trends on this year's harvest and next year's plantings that will start in September of 2011 for the winter wheat crop of June and July in 2012. The Kansas Wheat Commission sponsors a web site oriented to both producers and consumers (http://kansaswheat.org/aboutpageid304_AboutKansasWheatCommission.shtml), with facts, games, and resources for everything from nutritional supplements and pet foods, to wheat crafts, and sources for flour, wheat berries, and tortillas.

     Links to other websites show how the harvest for 2011 is progressing, with most of the winter wheat cut by late July, and the spring wheat scheduled for harvesting starting in August. The weight per bushel of wheat (which is affected by the moisture content), the percent of protein and moisture in the grains, and comparisons to prior years are shown for the different types of wheat and different areas of the country -- hard winter reds from Nebraska and Colorado, and soft winter reds from western Maryland and northern Ohio have been harvested, but the spring wheats and durum wheat have yet to be cut.   (http://www.uswheat.org/reports/harvest/doc/B477AB717EBDA39A852578DC00626CD3?OpenDocument#).

     The National Association of Wheat Growers' web site http://www.wheatworld.org/wheat-info/ focuses more on educating the public. Recipes, information about planting cycles, maps, weather discussions, statistics for commercial wheat growing in the U.S. and world-wide populate the site.

     The most interesting link, hands down, is to http://www.allaboardharvest.com/, a site with blogs from families who travel from wheat field to wheat field harvesting the crop. It's up-to-date -- (http://www.allaboardharvest.com/2011/08/megan-harvest-flashback-to-the-1960s/ is the post for Saturday, August 6, 2011), personal, and immediate -- the effects of the weather on the work, the costs of the machinery, photos of the combines and fields and the moves from one farm to the next.

     Here's a quote from a recent post (http://www.allaboardharvest.com/2011/08/jada-rained-out-2/):

Jada: Rained out

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Jada Bulgin

Hoffman Harvesting just got rained out. Yesterday our crew that was cutting in Lemmon moved back to Gettysburg to began cutting spring wheat, while the crew on the farm was able to start harvesting our spring wheat. Unfortunately, things were put to a stop as we are getting rained out in both places. In Bowdle they  were cutting wheat yielding in the 40′s with and a test weight of 60 prior to the rainfall. The protein was 15.

Since I was unable to be in the field, here are some random photos I haven’t posted as of yet.

James cuts my way.

A combine dumps on the go as the sun goes down.

The sky made the day interesting today.

Today's Discovery -- Purple Wheat

      Ten thousand years of cultivating wheat has resulted in thousands of varieties -- dwarf, resistant to pests and diseases, able to grow in short seasons, and bountiful in the amount produced per acre. In the process of re-discovering heritage seeds and finding the origins of today's wheats, the ancestors have found a new following. Spelt, emmer and einkorn all can be found on menus of exotic restaurants and in the seed bins of specialty companies. 


     Purple wheat is one of the newest for sale, marketed as originally out of Africa -- Ethiopia or East Africa, depending on who you ask. It's so new that it's riding the wave of trademarking almost everything, and most of what's available on the Internet comes with its own brand name. The selling points are its unusual color, its high doses of anti-oxidants, and its taste -- robust, nutty, and sweet, according to various sources.


     How would you use it? One company (http://www.strobl-naturmuehle.com/english/organic/purpur.htm) suggests everything from baguettes to breakfast cereals to biscuits. But you'd want to be pretty sure of your audience before putting a purple biscuit under the sausage gravy, or the strawberry shortcake. Another company is happy to sell you a 20-kg bag of PurpleBerry Wholegrain Flour™ (purple wheat flour combined with purple corn flour) and let you figure out for yourself how to use it (http://www.spectrum-ingredients.com.sg/ourproducts_baking_grains.html). A third company, Infraready Products, http://www.infrareadyproducts.com/products/cereal-grains.html sells purple wheat as "AnthoGrain™" 


     Growing the wheat yourself is an option too. Prairie Garden Seed in Saskatchewan, Canada will sell you Utrecht Blue, which is useful in their eyes for weaving wheat into decorative displays, as well as growing for food (http://www.prseeds.ca/catalogue/grain.php?C=Grain). 


    If you just want to try it out, (http://www.theswissbakery.com/store/p/464-Purple-Wheat.html) order it on-line from the Swiss Bakery, or  buy from the Austrian-run GrainHarvest BreadHouse in Waterloo and Kitchener, Ontario http://www.grainharvest.ca/store/grainharvest.

Parmesan Crisps

     If you love toasted cheese, parmesan crisps allow you to have all the glory of it without having to consume the bread or crackers that might go underneath. The recipe is simplicity itself:


Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.


Prepare two cookie sheets by lining each with parchment paper.


Mix 3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese, 1 1/2 cups shredded parmesan cheese , and 1/4 cup of all-purpose flour. Season with fresh-ground black pepper (and herbs, if you wish). 


Make small piles of mixture on the cookie sheets, about 15 to a sheet (standard 12 inch by 16 inch sheets), and flatten gently.


Bake for 6 to 8 minutes, until lightly browned. Remove pans from oven and let cool before lifting the crisps from the sheets. Makes 30 crisps.


If you make these without the flour, they will be lacier and chewier.