Supporting your Local Grains

On thinking about where your bread comes from.

Some kitchen projects: fermented dilly beans and our sourdough starter. The liquid on top of the starter is called “hooch” and means that I need to feed this starter!

Every day that Alex comes home from work, he is covered in flour. His blue jeans have changed into acid-washed grey, his hair has paled, and his glasses look dusted, like he is peering through a powdered donut. When we meet people (like when we had to stand and introduce ourselves in the last 4H meeting), we start out by saying our trade in mainly vegetable farming, with some livestock, even if that is on pause at the moment. Our mission has been organic food, and we have grown and helped grow a lot of it, from fruit to meat to eggs to vegetables, but working for a grain farm and mill has been a new one.

I really think of myself as a home cook, but not a baker. In college, I used to do a lot of vegan baking, mostly sweets (I was an on-again, off-again vegan back then!). At the time, I was working and trying to save up to travel abroad for my last semester of my senior year, and my best friend and roommate, Cathy, gave me the idea to also have a bake sale. For a whole two months before I went abroad to study Spanish and organic farming in Ecuador, I baked vegan cookies and brownies on Friday nights, and on Saturday mornings would go on campus, set up a table displaying the goodies wrapped in parchment paper, and sell everything on the table with a hand-painted sign that said “Help me go to South America!”. Thinking back, I was not very knowledgeable about the ingredients I was baking with. I tried to get organic as much as I could, and I bought organic vegetables from our local co-op, but I did not really think much about the origins of flour. Unknowingly, I could have been using white, bleached flour (shudder), as most all white flour is bleached to the color of snow, unless it is explicitly stated as “unbleached”. Most mainstream cake flour you can buy has been treated with chlorine gas to whiten its particles and hide the aging yellow that would otherwise naturally occur. There have not been enough studies to prove chlorinated flour is destructive to the body, but this practice is banned in Europe, and, unfortunately, widely spread in the States.

Grain can be a controversial subject to many; my culinary nutrition program I completed this last year very much touted for people to be gluten-free, so there was no wheat baking being taught. I, myself, think people should exercise caution, but don’t think most people (unless there is an issue like celiac disease) need to give up wheat completely. With so much contradictory information, and with my flour-covered husband able to get a steep discount on heirloom wheat that he and others have milled themselves, I decided to do more of a deep-dive into the world of this cultivated grass. The following are some key points I learned.

First, it is important that your flour is freshly-milled. The standard paper packages of whole wheat that you buy at the store has been in that package a while, most likely, and have gone rancid. According to Sally Fallon, all big-name grocery store flour is rancid; the minute you grind a kernel of wheat, the components begin to oxidize, the oils break down, and it begins to turn. The nutrients also diminish. Most flours have been sitting on the shelf, therefore, to oxidize for who-knows-how long. (Buying flour in bulk bins is even worse, as it has a lid that has been opened a million times, exposing it to even more air and more oxidation.) You can solve this problem by grinding grain yourself, or buy it pre-ground from a local wheat grower, ideally with a local mill on-site, like Meadowlark. Small mills used to be common; in 1873, there were 23,000 mills in the United States. In 1998, the number dropped to 201. Currently, four corporations account for about 70 percent of all of the wheat milled in this country; that’s a lot of old, oxidizing wheat flour being trucked around for miles on semis to then sit on shelves for weeks. When buying fresh and local flour, be sure to store it in the freezer to stop the oxidation process.

Another digestive-friendly trick is to make your bread and pizza flour sourdough, or fermented, using the wild yeast that is available freely in the air. Phytic acid occurs in the bran of all grains, and soaking or fermenting will treat it. Phytic acid is a nutrient blocker and will combine with minerals in the digestive tract and inhibit their absorption. For this reason, it is important to soak beans as well, and grains like oatmeal. Back in the day before square packages of yeast were available, all bread used to be sourdough, and it was a much more nutritionally beneficial way of baking. I am still learning and trying to perfect this art, thanks to my mother-in-law (a sourdough wizard) and plenty of books on the subject.

Local, heirloom wheat is also important. Meadowlark, as well as some other small farms, are working hard to bring back heirloom grains like Turkey Red or Red Fife, just two examples of heritage wheat. Before “gluten” was in the common vernacular, a study was done to see how many chromosomes were in different samples of wheat. Einkorn, said to be agriculture’s founder wheat, has seven chromosomes. Today’s standard commercial grain, referred to as “common wheat”, has twenty-one, after thousands of years of breeding to get the highest-yielding wheat possible. With all of those extra chromosomes, it is no wonder there are so many people with gluten sensitivities; it takes too much effort for our digestive tract to digest such a food, harming the lining of the small intestines, leading the villi to become truncated. Depending on peoples’ sensitivities, the harm it causes can be a slow process, but damaging, nonetheless.

Before working at Meadowlark, we did not eat a lot of bread, unless it was the occasional loaf I could get from a place like Hewn or Sauce and Bread Kitchen (another option to not baking: find a small bakery that does local, organic grains and bakes with a sourdough starter!). But now, with access to freshly ground grains, we have our sourdough starter that we feed, like a refrigerated pet. We have slowed our baking to just pizza night for now, since we have had some hot days, but winter is coming, and our starter is patiently waiting to become bread and butter at the dinner table.

From the farm table:

We are harvesting, and now is the time to really think of preserving, people! We froze some bags of kale, and though it is sometimes the last thing I want to do, it really is so helpful in the winter when everything is covered in snow and I really need something green to eat. Honestly, I will do anything not to buy greens from California, as I know it is possible to eat greens year-round in the upper Midwest, not just with the season extension of using simple, unheated hoop house structures, but with the art of freezing: to freeze hearty greens like kale, simply chop, blanch in a pot of boiling water for a few seconds, then pull out with a slotted spoon and dunk in a pot of cold water to cool, and put in a freezer bag to seal up and put in freezer. This is not the only way to do it, as I found out. One of the elders here in this community simply chops and puts it in a bag to freeze, just raw. She says it works fine. So, I don’t know. I haven’t tried that, but I guess her method would be simpler and take less energy! Aside from that, I’ve been doing lots of fermenting, with fermented dilly beans one of the projects. Basically, my goal is to preserve at least one thing every day. I figure if I can get the root cellar, freezer, and fridge really stocked this fall, I can hopefully barely go to the store this winter.

From the farm:

Again, not farming (yet!), but the garden in really booming, and our no-till methods are really working in terms of plant health and soil quality. I suppose I can think of this as a research year, seeing which methods are best, really studying the soil and plants and doing a permaculture plan for where ever we end up farming next season. The soil aggregates have been able to absorb all the rain we have been getting. I remember at our farm, before we started our low-till methods, I would listen to rain all night, wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling, about to have a panic attack thinking of our crops drowning. With these methods we have been using here, I wouldn’t even be worrying if we were production farming this year; I would be calm in knowing the rain would more likely be able to be absorbed without flooding. Anyway, yay for no-till and soil health!

I am still in the process of getting my PDC (permaculture design certificate) and I only have a few months to turn in my final project. I think this will also help for next season!

Books I’m Reading:

New section! I’d also love to hear about book recs in the comments, so please feel free to share; what are you all reading?

For one of my multiple books, I am reading Rachel Peden’s Speak the the Earth. She writes so beautifully about living on her Indiana farm, even about the mundane, like weaving a whole paragraph about the sky at sunset into one of her essays. I just love this gorgeous book and have been drinking it in, re-reading essays over and over.

I am also reading Melanie Warner’s Pandora’s Box, and re-reading The End of Food by Paul Roberts, mostly for research, but also for fun. (Yay for reading dark books about food for fun!!!). I also have Ali Berlow’s excellent Food Activist’s Handbook on my nightstand to just thumb through and re-read when I want to feel like everything isn’t so bleak out there.