Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (41 page)

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 artisanal 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
reconstituted 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 advertisement 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 artisanal 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 nourishing 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 shine 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 Washington 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.

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 God’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 courtship 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 competition.

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 passed 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 reconstitute 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 constitute 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.”)