A Yeast of One's Own

Natural yeast breads at Borough Market, London (photo by Teri Carns, 11/24/2011)

People love their natural yeast starters for baking bread. They name them, and narrate their histories in as much detail as their own family trees. They praise the rough crumb of the bread, the browned crust, and the sweet tang and bite of flavor made with their special starter. These mixes of flour, water, and the yeasts and bacteria that grow in them exemplify “terroir,” the French word for all of the qualities of a place embodied in the taste and character of a food or drink. And that helps to explain why they are so cherished.  They are living things that embody the qualities of the places in which they grow, and they impart that uniqueness to the breads made with them. But predictable as they might seem, like all families the yeasts and their bacteria have a streak of wildness in them. You can’t predict what nuances of flavors they might come up with and that wildness delights the tongue as well as the soul.

Natural yeast starters are among the most ancient of continually cultivated crops, or if you prefer, livestock, on earth. They combine both yeasts, cousins to mushrooms and the smallest of the fungi, and bacteria, which are more animal than plant. The yeasts that are best-known for both beer and bread are the Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which means sugar (saccharo-) fungus (myces);  Cerevisiae comes from Latin and means “of beer.” Hundreds of variants of the S. Cerevisiae cling to plants and float in the air everywhere, the variety depending on the food available for them in the area. Two other yeasts often found in natural starters are Candida milleri or Saccharomyces exiguus.

The Lactobacilli in natural yeast starters are a much more varied group and there are several of them in any given starter. The combinations of Lactobacilli in any given starter depend just as much on the area in which they live as do the yeast combinations. One of the rock stars of the bread world is Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, the lead creature in the group of Lactobacilli responsible for the unique tang of San Francisco sourdough. 

A recent commentary on mushrooms -- the yeasts' cousins, wildness, and terroir described the thinking of well-known forager, Hank Shaw (blog, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook)  Beth Pilar quoted Mr. Shaw, “'a wild thing living by its own wits not controlled by land or man" will produce something incomparable to what is grown for predictability and consistency.” Although the yeasts and bacilli can be tamed and sold commercially, if they can thrive in the more natural environment of a starter rather than coming from a carefully controlled factory they will yield more complex and rewarding tastes.

Terroir, the taste of home

Natural yeast starters take advantage of the local water, wheat, yeast and bacteria to express terroir. It is defined as the  “‘sense of place,’ . . . embodied in certain characteristic qualities, the sum of the effects that the local environment has had on the production of the product,” is perfectly represented by San Francisco’s sourdough. Its particular taste depends on letting both a bacillus and a yeast that prefer the Bay Area’s environment grow together for under specific circumstances. Taken to another location, the original San Francisco sourdough inevitably begins to lose its former taste and take on the qualities of its new home and the wheat and water that nourish it.

Chefs who are considered the world’s finest rely on breads made with local yeast and wheat. An example is Magnus Nilsson, of Faviken, Sweden, who in a meal that also features caviar in dried ducks’ blood cups and hand-cured hams, brings out the most classic of sourdough breads. “‘Do you see that trough?’ he [Nilsson] asks, pointing to a worn wooden vessel leaning against the wall. ‘That was what my grandmother made bread in. And it’s what we made this bread in as well.’ The wood is so impregnated with yeast that Nilsson no longer adds it to the recipe. In other words, he is not just using his grandmother’s bowl—he is using her yeast as well” [Robb Report, October 2011].

Another commentator who dined at Faviken noted: “This was the same tray that once belonged to Magnus Nilsson’s grandmother and her grandmother before her; it still harbours traces of the same sourdough culture she used . . .  now over two hundred years old. The family connection does not end there: with this ancestral starter, flour from Järna near Stockholm and from an island in lake Storsjön processed together at a mill in Östersund, he uses his wife’s recipe to bake a pain au levain loaf that possessed a thin yet crunchy crust and dense, dark yet moist and fluffy crumb.”  

Bread and beer, the ancient gifts

Who first figured out that fermentation was such a good thing? The Egyptians usually get the credit for discovering that water and grains left to themselves for a few days begin to bubble and brew, creating both raised bread and beer. But some authorities (Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food) say that the Babylonians led the way. “Babylonian beer was cloudy; indeed, the brewers of the time liked to thicken it with flour and let the mixture stand before fermenting it a second time, thus producing something which could be described as edible beer or alternatively drinkable bread. It might sometimes be cooked, and produced a raised cake or loaf.” The author says that the Egyptians took the Babylonian discoveries and became famous, exporting beer to the Athenians; the Greeks took the beer on to Gaul and Spain, and from there it quickly spread to the rest of Europe.

The History of Food suggests near the end of the Middle Ages someone rediscovered the use of beer yeast to raise the bread. Marie Medici “liked it so much that it was called Pain a la Reine, after her.”  Until the 19th century, a starter was the only method of making yeast breads. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Germans and Dutch began to develop cultures of yeast to sell for bread baking. Breeding strains of the standard bread yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to be consistent in flavor and easy to use and store meant that breads gradually lost their local uniqueness and became sweeter in taste. This was a good thing because if a starter went bad, it didn’t take a week to get another one going. It was easier to make a variety of breads, both at home and commercially, and to be sure that they would all have the same qualities.

Leeuwenhoek in Holland discovered the wild little creatures that made bread rise in his homemade microscopes in 1680, but it was Louis Pasteur in the mid-1800s who demonstrated their role in fermentation. Others refined the discoveries, and found that while yeast produced the carbon dioxide that stretched the gluten in wheat flour, and made the bread rise, it was a bacterium or several that gave sourdough bread many of its distinctive flavors.

Grow your own

Aficionados of natural yeast starters, passionate about their methods and discoveries, have shared a wealth of knowledge and technique through books and the Internet. A pathologist, Dr. Ed Wood, who took a fancy to sourdough set out to replicate the breads baked in conical ovens found in Egyptian tombs. He hypothesized that although the original yeasts and bacteria were not available, their direct descendants would still be floating around. And although no recipes were available, by experimentation he thought that he could recreate a dough and cooking techniques that would produce breads that the Pharaohs would recognize. 

Dr. Wood found local wheat and had it ground using techniques that were depicted in paintings and sculptures from four thousand years ago, blended it with Cairo water, and let it sit out on the balcony of his hotel at night to gather yeasts and bacteria. After a week of cultivating the starter, he experimented with mixing doughs and baking them in the clay ovens. Pleased with the results, he has written two books on the topic, World Sourdoughs from Antiquity, and Classic Sourdoughs.

Dr. Wood’s techniques are similar to those used by many other authorities on natural starters, but of course, each expert vigorously defends his or her way as the right way. Most agree on a few basic steps, but debate many of the points about when to feed the starter, what to feed it, how warm to keep it, and more.  The food chain in a natural starter begins with the food: wheat flour and water, mixed and left sitting in a bowl in a comfortably cool place (65 degrees is recommended, to give time for the richest tastes). The life in the starter, the yeasts and bacteria come from both the flour itself which is alive with microorganisms, including yeast and bacteria, and from those that are always floating through the air. Some land on the damp surface, and settle in along with those that rode in on the wheat. The yeasts eat the starches and sugars in the wheat, giving off alcohol and carbon dioxide. The Lactobacillus bacteria also eat the starches and sugars, but at a slower pace. They thrive in the acidic environment created by the yeasts, and add nuances to the tastes in the starter. A starter has to be given food (flour) and drink (water), or hibernated in a refrigerator or freezer because the yeasts and bacteria are living creatures using up the available nourishment. One blogger, Wardeh Harmon on passionatehomemaking.com offers an explanation:

"Regular flour feedings keep the organisms fed and in balance. But missing a feeding gives the bacteria a leg up. You see, the yeasts run out of food when the simple sugars in flour are all consumed, and they start dying off. But the bacteria still have food to eat. They eat the expired yeasts, along with the yeasts’ wastes, and continue to produce lactic acid, the main sour flavor. And so the starter gets more sour."

Start with wheat and water that are as close to home as possible. The wheat is more of a challenge, because it’s mostly grown in temperate climates that aren’t at extremes of heat or cold. It should be noted here that people make yeast ferments for starters from almost anything – rice, dandelions, any plant substance can be fermented, and will supply a yeast culture that will raise gluten-containing flours into breads. But this description focuses on wheat, so choose a wheat that was grown as near to your area as possible. Water can almost always be local, although it can be left to sit out to dissipate chlorine, or filtered or boiled to purify it.

Samuel Fromartz, writing about Tartine Bread, one of the most noteworthy new books on natural breads says:

"[Chad] Robertson's [author of Tartine Bread] main departure from standard practice comes with his natural leaven (I'm loathe to use the word sourdough, which is a misnomer, since this leaven is anything but sour). Unlike most leavens made with white flour, he uses 50% white and 50% whole wheat flour. Normally, that would lead to an explosion of activity, since the minerals and bran in whole wheat flour make for a very active starter that can be difficult to master.

But he tackles this problem by doing two things: first mixing a large amount of leaven - 400 grams total, or 2-3 cups - with just a tiny tablespoon of starter. Then he ferments it at a rather cool temperature to reduce its activity. The result is a mildly flavored leaven which when added to the dough inoculates the mix with copious amounts of yeast but has very mild acidic notes. Shining though is the sweetness of the wheat, which is probably why San Franciscans line up to get their hands on this bread. Plus the loaves just look gorgeous, judging from the pictures in the book by Eric Wolfinger."

Making a starter from scratch takes several days of feeding the yeasts and bacteria new flour and water daily (or oftener) to eat so that they can continue to grow and develop more complex flavors in the dough. But once the starter has matured, it can hibernate in the refrigerator for months at a time, getting warmed up and fed once a week, and then going back to its chilly den to rest. Feeding the yeasts new flour oftener, or adding sugars to the dough, makes a sweeter taste; letting the bacteria have more play gives more sourness. Peter Reinhart, in Crust and Crumb, describes this process in great detail, observing that creating a starter like this is “essential for attaining world-class results in many breads.” 

Natural yeast breads at Borough Market, London, (Photo by Teri Carns, 11/24/2011)

More detailed instructions are beyond the scope of this article. Two very different approaches are favored by Peter Reinhart and Chad Robertson. Peter Reinhart’s technique is described in his books; go to http://www.breadtopia.com/make-your-own-sourdough-starter/ for an Internet source for an adaptation. Here is a recipe for making Chad Robertson’s starter and a loaf of Tartine Bread. There are dozens more subtleties described in the care and feeding of natural starters by different writers, so choose one that works reliably for you, and enjoy experimenting. The cook is also an essential part of the terroir of the starter.

Foraging for a sourdough link

Lichens for dinner? Pine bark petit fours? Fireweed shoots and fiddlehead ferns? These appeared on the menu from Faviken Magasinet, as reported by FoodSnob blog, but could have been foraged from my backyard woods in the heart of Anchorage, Alaska which lies at nearly the same latitude as Jarpen, Sweden. Although no restaurant in Anchorage routinely serves lichens or fireweed shoots, many serve sourdough bread, also found at Magnus Nilsson's "superlocavore" Faviken Magasinet.

The sourdough appeared in a description of a May meal prepared by Mr. Nilsson. Many of the courses offered -- Wild Trouts Roe served in a Warm Crust of Dried Ducks Blood  for example, or pine bark petit fours for after dessert presented bits of nature that I don't usually think of as edible. The methods of preparation were equally unfamiliar. Shavings of Old Sow and Wild Goose featured thinly-shaved pork from a sow that had been hanging to dry for two years, and slices of goose that were aged for nine months. Many of the other ingredients saw their beginnings in previous years -- the "mature fermented mushroom juices from last year," and the duck egg and sour milk liquors. Some dishes, particularly the scallops, were still alive when cooked at the table before the waiting diners, or, like the fireweed, had been foraged earlier the same day.

Intriguingly, the sourdough bread was one of the few things served at the meal that would have been recognized and served without fanfare almost anywhere, especially Alaska. Made with 200-year-old sourdough from the chef's grandmother, flour from wheat grown nearby, and the grandmother's kneading trough, the end result was more about tradition than about emphasizing creative and minimalist presentations.  "Bröd och smör: Tove’s Bread and the Very Good Butter. As the bread was brought out, an old kneading trough was shown off. It was served with a story. This was the same tray that once belonged to Magnus Nilsson’s grandmother and her grandmother before her; it still harbours traces of the same sourdough culture she used – now over two hundred years old. The family connection does not end there: with this ancestral starter, flour from Järna near Stockholm and from an island in lake Storsjön processed together at a mill in Östersund, he uses his wife’s recipe to bake a pain au levain loaf that possessed a thin yet crunchy crust and dense, dark yet moist and fluffy crumb. It was simply excellent. The very good butter (its official name here), from close by Oviken and with a texture like melting cheddar, was superb too." [from the Food Snob blog review]

The degree of focus on terroir -- "the sum of the effects that the local environment has had" on the taste and qualities of a food, and attention to preparation of food found at Farviken Magasinet might seem limiting to most Alaskans, even those who work with the same principles of eating local foods. Kirsten Dixon, one of the state's better known chefs (she recently appeared on the Today show) and cookbook authors creates with foods found in Alaska, but happily combines raw seaweed pulled from the Tutka Bay beach with flax seed, sun-dried tomatoes, lemon juice and cayenne pepper into sea crackers that have their roots in half a dozen different climates.

From her perspective, Alaskan cuisine is based in the many cultures that have left their mark on Alaska -- the Alaskan Native peoples, the Russians, Asians, and the gold miners. She sees sourdough as representative of "hearty and determined pioneers." Swedish cuisine as re-imagined by Mr. Nilsson with his innovations at Farviken Magasinet draws on local ingredients and techniques that have been used for generations within that one country, including his grandmother's sourdough. And thus the sourdough bread that links the two cuisines is just as at home in the Alaskan repetoire as it is in Jarpen.

A week of wheatavoring

One can eat well as a wheatavore. We just spent a week in Seattle and Victoria, B.C. and we ate great wheat every day. From veggie arrabiata at Fiamo in Victoria and carta di musica atTutta Bella in Wallingford (Italian), to croissants and palmiers at LePanier (French) in Pike Street Market, to udon at Boom Noodles (Japanese) at University Village to naan and samosas at Pabla (Indian) in Renton, the wheat dishes came from around the world.

                                             Pappardelle's at Pike Street Market


We found wheat to take home as well, from Pappardelle's Pasta in Pike Street Market across from Sosio's produce stand. The company has a website, and sells online as well. We took Extreme Habanero back to Anchorage to try ourselves, and Calypso, a mix of lime, mango-peach, and red Southwestern chile lumache shells for a friend. We didn't have room in our carrry-ons for the dark chocolate linguini, so will have to order that.

Pappardelle's gives out recipes, both on the website, and with each package of pasta purchased. But it's easy to think of interesting twists. The recipes offered for the chocolate pastas focus on desserts, with ice cream and chocolate sauce and fresh raspberries. Hard to beat that, but how about trying the chocolate gemelli instead of a plain pasta in this cacao and zucchini absorbtion recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini blog? Or use the Extreme Habanero radiatore with that chocolate sauce and rich vanilla ice cream -- a livelier dessert than most.

Gilding the lily – pasta with bread crumbs

We walked to Barnes and Noble this evening, delighting in the long sunset brightening the sky. There are unnerving new open spaces even since our visit a couple of weeks ago – bookstores are meant to be lined with books, not minimalist in their displays of them. On many of the remaining shelves, bright-colored puzzles and board games replaced the books, not offering knowledge or new worlds but entertainment. I felt it critical to buy something papered and wordy as a small statement of my view of the real worth of bookstores, so picked up a “Lonely Planet” travel magazine and the October 2011 issue of “La Cucina Italiana.”

“La Cucina Italiana” features pasta this month, with many of the recipes relying on the eternal marriage of pasta and tomatoes using different shapes and methods of preparation:

∙ tagliolini all’uovo con passata fresca casalinga (fresh egg tagliolini with homemade tomato sauce)

∙ elich con salsa di san marzano e ortaggi aromatici (pasta with fresh plum tomato sauce)

∙ spaghetti con pomodori al forno (spaghetti with oven roasted tomatoes)

∙ mezzi paccheri con pomodorini ciliegia all marinara (mezzi paccheri with cherry tomoato marinara sauce)

∙ tortiglioni con salsa di pelati (tortiglioni with tomato sauce)

∙ linguine con polpa fresca in dadolata (lingune with fresh chopped tomatoes)

∙ linguine con san marzano e erbe (linguine with plum tomatoes and herbs)

 The pappa al pomodoro, Tuscan tomato and bread soup, sounded very much like the linguine con polpa fresca in dadolata and the linguine con san marzano e erbe except that it used bread instead of pasta. 

      But my favorite was spaghettoni con mollica e pomodoro – spaghetti with breadcrumbs and tomatoes – that managed to gild the lily by topping pasta and tomato sauce with bread crumbs roasted in olive oil. Besides the La Cucina Italiana recipe (in the magazine, but not on the website), dozens of recipes for pasta featuring breadcrumbs with other ingredients are available on the Internet, including  with sardines, from the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31minirex.html), or from the Food Network (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/sicilian-style-sardine-pasta-with-bread-crumbs-recipe/index.html); with mixed chopped olives (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/everyday-italian/spaghetti-with-olives-and-bread-crumbs-recipe/index.html); or with fried peppers and anchovies and tomatoes (http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Pasta-with-Fried-Peppers-and-Bread-Crumbs). That last is the one I will try next time I get a chance to cook. The idea of toasted bread crumbs on top of pasta is irresistible and the fried peppers must be the perfect finish.

Wonder bread vs. the artisan loaf -- moral choice or economic?

In 2011, the person eating the peasant loaf at $4.50 from the artisan organic bakery is likely to be not the peasant, but someone who is looking for more subtle values embodied in the bread than simply a sandwich that the kids will eat. Is it elitism, or love for food? Is it deadly, or just good food that’s affordable and quick to fix? Is the bread you eat a moral choice, or a function of your income and class?

Throughout history bread has marked social status, with white and wheaten bread reserved for the better-off, and barley and brown bread for the lower classes. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, says: “White bread has enjoyed, for most of history, universal esteem because it seems to embody refinement: compared with its brown and black cousins, it is the product of a longer process, a more intense use of labor . . . [and] often involves superior – that is, costlier – grains.” (p. 126)

Bread isn’t the only food used to symbolize choices that can be as easily characterized as moral as they can be described as related to income and class. Recently, Anthony Bourdain was quoted in a TV Guide article as saying that Paula Deen was “The worst, most dangerous person to America . . .” because the food she recommends is “ killing us.” Paula Deen responded by arguing that the issue was one of social class and resources rather than morals. In a New York Post interview responding to Bourdain, Deen said, “You know, not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine. My friends and I cook for regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills . . . It wasn’t that long ago that I was struggling to feed my family, too.” 

A New York Times food writer, Frank Bruni, summed up the dispute by saying:  “. . . To give [Bourdain] his due: we are too fat and must address that. But getting Deen to unplug the waffle iron doesn’t strike to the core of the problem any more than posting fast-food calorie counts or taxing soft drinks do. A great deal of American obesity is attributable to the dearth of healthy food that’s affordable and convenient in low- and even middle-income neighborhoods, and changing that requires a magnitude of public intervention and private munificence that are unlikely in such pinched times.”

Another observer of the freight that food carries besides its nutritional values is artist Judith Klausner, whose toast slices embroidered with patterns that mimic mold and cameo-carved Oreo cookies are meant to carry a message about class and society. In an interview with Here and Now, she said, “Ideally we should work towards having a future where fresh and local food isn’t more expensive and everyone can afford it,” she said.  “But I think right now having it cast entirely as a moral question really glosses over the issue of class that’s involved.” By using familiar food as the basis for works of art she “hopes to challenge the mindset that things were ‘better back when,’ for instance, before corn syrup and 15-letter preservatives.” The Oreos and toast are part of a recent series of works, “From Scratch,” in which “Klausner tries to draw attention to the little-discussed benefits of the rise of processed food. She argues that processed foods let women spend less time cooking from scratch and freed them up to a world of new choices.”

“‘When you have someone in every household whose dedicated full-time job whether they liked it or not was to cook everything from scratch– yes, you’re going to have everything made at home,’ she told Here & Now‘s Robin Young. ‘But that means that women didn’t have choices, and I think we’re in a much better position now.’” 

Her point emphasizes the social class again – in households where the food was made “from scratch” by servants, presumably the women supervising the servants were free to make other choices. The fact that those choices often were limited to embroidery of the sort that Klausner now applies to toast suggests the complexity that underlies societies, and the fact that the symbolism can only take the discussion so far and no further.

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

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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.