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fast-growing national franchise chain. They bake and sell only whole grain breads; all their wheat flour is
freshly ground daily on the premises in the back. Unfortunately, as of the writing of this book, they do not
grind their rye flour but bring it in sacks. I can't recommend their rye breads. The founder of Great Harvest is
a knowledgeable buyer who fully understands my next topic, which is that wheat is not wheat.
There are great differences between hard bread wheats; being organically grown is no cure all for making
good or nutritious bread. Great Harvest understands this and uses top quality grain that is also Organic.
When I first stated making my own bread from my own at-home-ground flour I was puzzled by variations in
the dough. Sometimes the bread rose well and was spongy after baking like I wanted it to be. Sometimes it
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kneaded stickily and ended up flat and crumbly like a cake. Since I had done everything the same way except
that I may have bought my wheat berries from different healthfood stores, I began to investigate the subject of
wheat quality.
The element in the cereal that forms the rubbery sponge in risen bread so it doesn't crumble and rises high
without collapsing, is gluten. The word glue derives from gluten. The gluten content of various wheats varies.
Bread bakers use "hard wheat" because of its high gluten content. Gluten is a protein and gluten comprises
most of the protein in bread wheat; the protein content and the gluten content are almost identical.
Try this. Ask your healthfood store buyer or owner what the protein content is of the hard red wheat seeds
they're selling. You'll almost certainly get a puzzled look and your answer will almost certainly be, "we have
Organic and conventional." Demand that the store buyer ask this question of their distributor/wholesaler and
then report back to you. If the distributor deigns to answer, the answer will be the same--I sell Organic or
conventional hard red wheat. Period. When I got these non-answers I looked further and discovered that hard
bread wheats run from about 12 percent protein to about 19 percent and this difference has everything to do
with the soil fertility (and to an extent the amount of rainfall during the season), and almost nothing to do with
Organic or conventional.
This difference also has everything to do with how your dough behaves and how your bread comes out. And
how well your bread nourishes you. Thirteen percent wheat will not make a decent loaf--fourteen percent is
generally considered #2 quality and comprises the bulk of cheap bread grain. When you hear in the financial
news that a bushel of wheat is selling for a certain price, they mean #2. Bakers compete for higher protein lots
and pay far higher prices for more protein.
We prefer our bread about 25% rye, but rye contains no gluten at all. Mix any rye flour into fourteen percent
wheat flour and the dough becomes very heavy, won't rise, and after baking, crumbles. So I kept looking for
better grain and finally discovered a knowledgeable lady that sold flour mills and who also was a serious
baker herself. She had located a source of quality wheat with an assayed protein content and sold it by the 50
pound sack. When I asked her if her wheat was Organic she said it was either sixteen or seventeen percent
protein depending on whether you wanted hard red spring wheat or hard white spring wheat. Organic or
conventional? I persisted. No, she said. High protein!
So, I said to myself, since protein content is a function of soil fertility and since my body needs protein, I
figured I am better off eating the best quality wheat, pesticide/herbicide residues (if there are any) be damned.
Think about it! The difference between seventeen percent and fourteen percent protein is about 25 percent.
That percentage difference is the key threshold of nutritional deficiency that makes teeth fall out. We can't
afford to accept 25% degradations in our nutritional quality in something that we eat every day and that forms
the very basis of our dietary.
Please understand here that I am not saying that high protein wheats can't be grown organically. They
certainly can. The founder of Great Harvest Bakery performs a valuable service locating and securing
high-protein lots of organically grown wheats for his outlets. But often as not Organic products are no more
nourishing than those grown with chemicals. Until the buyers at Organic whole food wholesalers get better
educated about grain, obtaining one's personal milling stock from them will be a dicey proposition.
Sometimes Organic cereal can be far worse than conventional. To make a cereal Organic is a negative
definition; if it hasn't had chemicals, then its Organic. Grain is one of the few foods that will still produce
economic yields of low quality seed on extremely infertile soil or when half-smothered in weeds because
herbicides weren't used for reasons of ideological purity. Vegetables will hardly produce anything under those
conditions; carelessly grown fruits and vegetables are inevitably small, misshapen, unmarketable. But seed
cleaning equipment can remove the contamination of weed seeds in cereal grains (at a cost.)
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The price the farmer receives for Organic cereal grain is much higher, so it is possible to accept rather low
yields or expend more money for cleaning out high levels of weed seeds from the field-run harvest, and still
make a good profit. A lousy Organic cereal crop like this might even make a higher profit because the farmer
has been spared the expense of fertilization, of rotation, of weed control. I remember once I bought a sack of
Organic whole oats that were the smallest, most shriveled, bitterest oats I've ever tried to eat. We ended up
throwing out that tiny, light (lacking density) seed in favor of using the "conventional" whole oats that were
plump, heavy and sweet.
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