Sustainable Wheat: This bread is our bread

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David Yarrow

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Apr 19, 2013, 1:06:33 AM4/19/13

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CLOSING THE FOOD CIRCLE: SUSTAINABLE WHEAT & LOCAL BREAD
new flour mill grinds regional wheats for Asheville NC bakers
http://www.mountainx.com/article/49563/This-bread-is-our-bread

This bread is our bread

By Emily Patrick on 04/18/2013, in Mountain Express

How to read bread

The color and texture of a loaf of bread tells a story about how it was made. When reading a loaf, remember that every baker has different goals, says David Bauer of Farm & Sparrow. Sometimes, you need simple sandwich bread; other times, you want something with dramatic flair.

Crumb structure: What do the holes inside the bread look like? Machine-made mixing produces bread with tiny holes and a uniform look. Hand-mixed creations have an irregular pattern.

Color: The hue of a loaf tells what kind of flour was used and how it was handled. Grain has three parts: fibrous bran, starchy endosperm and oily germ. Different flours contain different combinations of these parts. Darker flours often contain more bran.

Artisan bread has complex coloring. Flecks of different parts of the grain show up in the crumb, as well as a rich, yellow-brown undertone from the germ oil.

Bread’s color gets lighter with more handling. When dough reacts with air, it bleaches. Industrial breads look whiter than gently mixed varieties.

Crust: Bakers determine what the outside of a loaf will look like before they put it in the oven. Light breads have a smooth exterior, while those with a fuller flavor show small, rough bubbles in the crust.
Within every loaf of bread, there's a message. Beneath the crust, spiraling glyphs of flour, salt, water and yeast tell a story of grain farms, millers and bakers.

For those unschooled in the alphabet of the crumb, bread's inner complexities resemble a web of caverns. Luckily, even the bread illiterate can taste the message.

Among bakers, these caverns are called “crumb structure.” “The crumb of your loaf really tells a story about where it comes from,” says Tara Jensen, who owns Smoke Signals Baking. “It's giving us information about our lives, our farms and our mills and environment.”

Jensen wants her bread to speak through texture and taste. She calls it “honest bread,” loaves that contain just four ingredients and have nothing to hide. At the West Asheville and downtown tailgate markets, Jensen sells several varieties of bread, each distinct from the others but made from nearly identical materials.

Flour variety creates the difference between loaves, and Jensen orders hers from Carolina Ground. The small, stone mill sources North Carolina grain from within 400-miles of Asheville and produces more than a dozen varieties of flour for Jensen’s experimentation. “This flour helped my bread strike a chord,” she says. “It gave it something to say, something substantial, flavor-wise, texture-wise.”

Celebrating its first birthday this spring, Carolina Ground is a relatively new resource for this region. It focuses on providing local flavor by grinding small orders of grain into thought-provoking flours. Ironically, it owes its existence to a global vortex of stock deals, abstract figures and commodity speculators.

Today, the business counters the ups and downs of the stock market by nurturing stable relationships between producers of grain, flour and bread. The team of bakers, millers, farmers and investors behind the mill considers local markets (such as those where Jensen sells her bread) as investments in the future.

The grain bust

David Bauer, who owns Farm & Sparrow Bakery and co-owns the forthcoming All Souls Pizza, remembers some of the worst bread he ever produced. The unpalatable loaves weren't amateur productions or experiments. They came from the thrashing of the national grain economy.

In 2008, a speculative, grain-buying free-for-all made wheat scarce, and what was available was shoddy. “You couldn't get good grain during that time,” Bauer says. “The bread was just dying on the hearth.”

Bauer wasn't the only baker struggling. Everyone who sourced grain or flour from commercial mills paid high prices for sub-par product until the speculative bubble burst. Prices tumbled, though they still haven't returned to their pre-2008 lows. “Everyone's bread was just deteriorated because we were all tied into that same network,” says Bauer, who also serves on the board of Carolina Ground. “The whole idea of working with farmers and growing wheat regionally came about during the wheat crisis.”

Well, most of that idea, anyway, explains Jennifer Lapidus, general manager of Carolina Ground. Scientists such as David Marshall at North Carolina State University had been studying methods for growing grain in North Carolina for several years before the price spikes. But the crisis was a call to action for anyone with a stake in grain.
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http://www.mountainx.com/article/49563/This-bread-is-our-bread

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David Yarrow

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