Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 16

Using commercial yeast to leaven whole-grain flour so rapidly may present another problem for our health. All whole grains contain phytic acid, which locks up minerals not only in the bread but, if you eat enough of it, in the body of the bread eater as well. One of the advantages of a long sourdough fermentation, as we've seen, is that it breaks down the phytic acid, freeing up those minerals. It also makes the gluten proteins more digestible and slows the body's absorption of starch. That's why a sourdough white bread actually has a lower glycemic index than a commercially yeasted whole-grain bread.

There is a second paradox here: Wonder Bread would seem to be a much more highly processed product than the bread I bake at home, with its dozens of additional ingredients and high-speed production methods. And yet, since the wheat in it never undergoes a true fermentation, Wonder Bread is in some respects less processed-less completely cooked-than the bread I bake at home. At least when it comes to processing wheat, sometimes less is more and more turns out to be less.

At the conclusion of my tour the Hostess bakers gave me a few loaves, and on the drive up to Dave Miller's I sampled three types of neoWonder Bread. The Soft 100% Whole Wheat smelled strongly of yeast and mola.s.ses and was a shade darker than the whiteasWonder Bread "Made with Whole Grain" loaf. The two loaves tasted equally sweet, which is to say very, and though the 100 percent whole wheat was not quite as cottony soft, I'm not sure I could have told them apart with my eyes closed. (Since I was driving, I decided to postpone that particular test.) My least favorite loaf was the Smart White, the one with the fiber equivalent of (but not the actual fiber from) 100 percent whole wheat. After an initial impression of sweetness, I registered several distinctly off flavors, probably from the cottonseed, wood pulp, and other nonwheat fibers and the minerals added to it-all the fibrous and rocky "garbage" that Hostess had baked into it.

After a while, all the neoWonder Breads began to seem the same, and less like bread than nutrient delivery systems. Yet it isn't at all clear that such a reductive approach to nutrition-in which wheat seeds are broken down into their component parts and then rea.s.sembled along with other processed plant parts, some minerals, an additive or two derived from petroleum, and a ton of yeast to loft the whole deal-actually yields a healthy or even a healthier loaf of bread. These breads were really nutritional conceits, clever ways to work the words "whole grain" or "whole wheat" onto a package, now that those magic words const.i.tute an implied health claim. But the idea of whole grain in these products clearly counted for more than the reality, which Hostess treated as something to overcome, disguise, or merely allude to. These were notional breads, and eventually they turned to cotton in my mouth. I was reminded of Richard Bourdon's saliva test for good bread: Did a wad of it make your mouth water? These three flunked.

I had heard from Chad that Dave Miller had once owned a bakery called Wunder Brot, so when I showed up at the door to his bakery-basically a suite of rooms attached to his house, which was tucked into a lovely remote hillside in the Sierra Foothills, south and east of Chico-I presented him with a couple of loaves of late-model Wonder Bread. He looked slightly horrified, but managed a smile. A slender man in his late forties with a trim goatee, Dave was dressed in a crisp white pocket T-s.h.i.+rt and clogs. I wondered if this was the first plastic-bagged loaf of sliced bread ever to cross his threshold.

Miller's Bake House is a one-man show. It was a Thursday, and Dave was grinding wheat and mixing dough for his weekly bake the next morning. He kept one eye on the mill, a stone wheel encased in a handsomely crafted wooden cabinet made in Austria, and the other on his Artofex mixer, an old-timey, pink-painted contraption from Switzerland. A pair of steel arms moved lazily up and down through the bowl of wet flour, convincingly simulating the action of human hands kneading dough.

Dave Miller is an uncompromising baker, as fiercely devoted to whole grains and wet doughs and natural leavens as Richard Bourdon. (If not more so: Only one of his breads contains any white flour.) But compared with his voluble, flamboyant mentor, Miller comes across as very much the Protestant baker, spare with his p.r.o.nouncements and something of an ascetic. Though he used to own bakeries and manage employees (including Chad Robertson), for the past seven years he has stripped his vocation down to its Th.o.r.eauvian essentials: one man, some sacks of wheat, a couple of machines, and an oven. Miller's Bake House is almost completely off the grid: Solar panels power the mill and the cold room where he r.e.t.a.r.ds his loaves, and the Italian deck oven is fired with wood that he chops himself. I asked if the wood imparted flavor to the bread. "It's not about the flavor. It's that I would rather not be a party to wars for oil."

The afternoon I visited, Miller was agonizing over whether to add a pinch of as...o...b..c acid-often used to strengthen low-protein flours-to his Kamut dough. Dave disdained additives on principle, but the crop of Kamut (an ancient variety of durum wheat) that a farmer had grown for him had come in weak-low in protein-this year, and the loaves were somewhat depressed as a result. The as...o...b..c acid promised to help the dough hold a bit more air, but adding it meant veering ever so slightly from "the right path," as the Miller's Bake House Web site describes his approach. Short of landing at a bakery on Alpha Centauri, I could not have traveled farther from the Hostess plant, where as...o...b..c acid is one of the more natural ingredients in use. "I have met the bread monk," I jotted in my notebook.

Dave took me into the back room to see his mill. It was a tall wooden contraption with a hopper on top that held fifty pounds of wheat at a time, feeding it gradually through an aperture that opened onto the sandwich of revolving stones inside. Though "gradually" does not do justice to the glacial pace of this machine. The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if pa.s.sing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of warm, tan flour that slowly acc.u.mulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a whiff. Freshly milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I'd read about the etymology of the word "flour"-that it is the flower, or best part, of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled delicious.

That whiff of fresh flour delivered a little epiphany. Up to now, I had been more or less indifferent to whole wheat. I liked it okay, probably more than most, but I ate it mainly because it was better for me than white bread, not because it tasted better. So you might say that I, too, liked the idea of whole grain more than the actual experience, just like the bakers and food scientists at Hostess. Though I didn't mind the coa.r.s.eness, or the density, even the best whole-grain breads usually tasted as though they were being stingy with their flavor, holding something back. I hadn't yet tried Dave's bread, but the fragrance of his flour made me think I had probably never really experienced the full potential of whole-grain wheat, something I now suddenly very much wanted to do.

Dave milled his own grain because that was the only way he could buy wheat directly from farmers and guarantee the freshness of his flour. "The moment the seed is opened up is the moment of its greatest potential. As soon as it's milled, it begins to oxidize, losing the energy that could be nouris.h.i.+ng us. That's also the moment of maximum flavor before it begins to fade."

Dave's foremost concern as a baker has always been with health. His own "eureka moment" came in the early eighties at a bakery in Minneapolis, with a taste of a 100 percent whole-grain bread. "One bite of that bread and I could feel my whole body respond. It just felt so right." Extracting the full nutritional value from wheat dictates every step of his baking process, yet Dave sees no trade-off between health and flavor, and in fact believes that the flavor of bread is a good indicator of its nutritional quality. In this, grains are a little like fruit, the fragrant ripeness of which signifies they have arrived at their nutritional peak. But, unlike fruit, grains also need to be processed with care-properly fermented and baked-in order to achieve peak taste and nutrition. For Dave that means a wet dough to thoroughly cook the grain, a long, slow fermentation, and a thorough bake in a hot oven.

Dave invited me to spend the night so I could watch the whole twenty-four-hour process unfold from start to finish. When I dragged myself from bed the following morning at five, he had already been at it for a couple of hours, firing up the oven and shaping loaves that had risen in the walk-in cooler overnight. Dave's doughs were by far the wettest I'd seen (up to 104 percent hydration*), and he handled them as gently as newborns, turning them in their buckets even less frequently than Chad did. Dave was long accustomed to working by himself ("I like baking alone; it's such an intense sensory thing"), but by the second day he was willing to let me handle his babies, showing me how to shape the batards and pan breads. Some of these doughs were so wet that to keep them from sticking you dipped your hands in water rather than flour. It was monastically quiet in the bakery as we worked, still dark outside, and the smells were captivating: malty and floral and, as soon as Dave began feeding loaves into the oven, irresistible.

But Dave wouldn't let me taste any bread until it had properly cooled and "set," so I couldn't have a taste until I was already on the road home. The warm loaves filled the car with the aroma I had smelled in the mill room. Don't tell Dave, but I was able to hold off only as long as it took to steer my car out of his driveway.

The bread was a revelation. I felt as though I was tasting wheat for the very first time. The flavor held nothing back; it was rich, nutty, completely obliging in its sweetness. The crumb was moist and glossy. I ate a whole loaf before I got to the highway.

But the bread was not perfect. There could have been much more contrast between crumb and crust, which wasn't crisp at all, and the loaves were broad and low-slung. "You're always fighting gravity with whole grain," Dave had said earlier that morning, as he withdrew from the oven a wooden peel laden with loaves that looked a tad depressed. "But I don't mind a dense loaf if it's moist." Dave had accepted the trade-off: flavor and nutrition for volume. A sacrifice of air.

Dave Miller's bread was delicious, but not everything I'd dreamed of in a whole-grain loaf. Yet what I tasted and smelled in his bakery made me determined to bake with whole grains from now on-to see if I couldn't get some of those flavors in my bread, but with a tougher crust and a lot more air. Baking white bread suddenly seemed boring. I'd had a glimpse, a taste, of what was possible, and it was so much more than I'd ever imagined. A good whole-grain loaf became my grail, and I spent the next few months baking 100 percent whole-wheat loaves one after another.

That first month, a great many worthy brown bricks came out of my oven, loaves decidedly more virtuous than tasty. The G-forces at work in my oven had never seemed so oppressive, as if I were suddenly baking on another, much larger planet. I struggled for weeks with sourness. The whole-grain flour seemed to overstimulate my sourdough culture, inspiring prodigious outpourings of acid from the bacteria while quickly tuckering out the yeasts. I wasn't sure if I should attribute the anemic oven spring I was experiencing to exhausted yeasts or to the sharp bran knives slas.h.i.+ng my gluten to ribbons.

I was still using Chad Robertson's basic recipe, subst.i.tuting whole-grain flour for white, and soon realized I needed to make some adjustments. I read that since bran softens as it absorbs water, those little knives could be somewhat dulled with a wetter dough and a longer rest before mixing. So I stepped up to a 90 percent hydration and extended the autolyse to an hour. The wetter mix seemed to soften the bran, yet left me with me a dough that proved trickier to shape and build tension into-yet another cause of lousy oven spring. Dave Miller's words-"You're always fighting gravity with whole grains"-rang in my ears after every one of those disappointing bakes. Yet I wasn't quite prepared to give up on air.

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 artisa.n.a.l 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 reconst.i.tuted 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 artisa.n.a.l 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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 G.o.d'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 courts.h.i.+p 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 compet.i.tion.

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 pa.s.sed 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 reconst.i.tute 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 const.i.tute 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.")

I left Certified Foods with two sacks of flour and some new ideas about how to bake a better loaf of whole-grain bread. For Vanderliet, everything came back to the seed-that "perfect package." To mill good whole-grain flour, the miller had to understand what was going on in that package, not just the parts-the germ, bran, and endosperm-but the intricate relations.h.i.+p between them, and the biological system at work. The function of that system was to protect the embryo of a new wheat plant until the time came for it to germinate, and then to supply all the nutrients the new plant needed to get its start in life. This much is obvious, but the implications for milling, and in turn for baking bread, are not.

During my tour I had asked Joe if he wetted, or tempered, his grain before milling it, something commercial mills routinely do in order to loosen the bran coat so that it will more easily slip off the seed. "Never!" he barked. Wetting the seed, he explained, ruins whole-grain flour. As soon as the bran coat absorbs water, the seed receives a signal to germinate, setting off a cascade of chemical events in the germ and bran that would destabilize any flour that still contained them. (Since the bran and germ are removed when milling white flour, tempering in that case is not a problem.) Enzymes are activated. Some of them begin to break open the polymers of starch and protein, while others liberate the sequestered minerals-all to nourish the nascent plant. The miller's job is to keep the seed in dormant mode rather than throw it into germination mode.

"So, to mill whole-grain flour well," I had said to Joe, "you really have to be able to think like a seed, don't you?" He smiled.

"You're a very good student."

That's when it dawned on me: The same holds true for the baker. He, too, needs to think like a seed in order to bake a whole-grain loaf full of flavor and air. Except that his seed thoughts are a little different from the miller's. The baker wants to set off that cascade of chemical events. He wants the amylase enzymes to break up those tasteless b.a.l.l.s of starch, creating simple sugars to flavor his bread and feed his hungry yeasts. (The baker needs to think like yeast and bacteria, too, which is a lot of thinking.) The baker wants the proteases to begin breaking the wheat proteins into amino acids and the phytase to unlock the minerals, not to nourish the plant but to nourish us. And water was the key.

I had read about techniques for "presoaking" flours-part of the traditional culture of whole-grain baking that we have lost-and now I understood the logic behind them: to trick the crushed seed into thinking it was time to germinate. So I embarked on a set of experiments to kick-start the enzymatic activity in my dough even before fermentation got under way. I began mixing my flour and water in the evening, at the same time I started my leaven. Not until the next morning, however, would I introduce the one to the other. By the time the sourdough culture began to work on the presoaked flour, it would find all the nutrients it could want: plenty of sugars, amino acids, and minerals. This was a fact I could taste: The flour sweetened dramatically overnight. And the results out of the oven were encouraging. I started getting loaves that were generous with their flavors, had crispier and more handsome crusts (probably because more sugars and amino acids were available for browning reactions), and markedly more air.

But not quite as much air as I hoped for, not yet. The bran was still undermining the gluten, either by puncturing the gas bubbles or by weighing them down, giving me a too-tight crumb. I hit on a slightly wacky idea: I would remove the bran from the inside of the bread and put it on the outside, where it could do no damage to the gluten. So, before mixing my flour and water, I sifted the chunkiest bran out of the flour, maybe 10 percent of the total volume.

In effect, I was making white (or whitish) flour circa 1850, preroller mill, the kind of flour in the painting by emile Friant that had inspired Chad Robertson. It still had the germ, but only those particles of bran small enough to slip through an ordinary sieve. However, I reserved the sifted bran in a bowl, and after shaping the loaves, I rolled them in the stuff, making sure that every last shard of bran was taken up by the wet skin of the dough.

It worked: The trick allowed me to bake an airy and delicious loaf with a toasty, particulate crust-all the while preserving my claim to a "100 percent whole-grain" bread. Does this seem like cheating? I don't think so: Every last bit of the whole grain was somewhere in this triumphantly voluminous loaf. I felt like I had broken whole grain's Gordian knot.

Though on reflection I seriously doubt this solution is original with me. In the age-old quest to bake the airiest possible loaf from whole-grain flour, a great many other bakers would surely have hit on the same trick. Like presoaking flours, it is too good an adaptation not to have been tried before. In all likelihood, "my" technique or one like it is part of the traditional culture of whole-grain baking that got crushed by the roller mills late in the nineteenth century.

In the weeks and months since, I've loosened up considerably in my baking. I still mostly use whole-grain flours, but I no longer obsess about percentages or purity. I don't always roll my loaves in bran-sometimes I use it in the garden instead, to thwart slugs and snails. I've also found a commercial version of the kind of flour I was making by sifting whole grains. Called "high extraction" flours, these are milled whole and then partially sifted. This strikes me as a reasonable compromise between 100 percent whole-grain and white flour, between nutrition and aesthetics. (After all, even 100-percent whole-grain flour is 75-percent endosperm.) But even when I bake with these flours, I add a variety of other whole grains to deepen and complicate the bread's flavor: some pumpernickel that I got from Joe Vanderliet, some purple rye that Chad Robertson gave me, even lately some Kernza, an experimental flour milled (whole) from a new strain of perennial grain being developed by the Land Inst.i.tute in Salina, Kansas. A perennial wheat field that could be mowed like a lawn rather than planted each year from seed would have tremendous benefits for both the land and the farmer, but it is probably still some ways off. Kernza has an interesting flavor but, as yet, not enough gluten to raise a loaf of bread on its own.

Everything that I've learned about wheat and milling, fermentation and baking has definitely complicated my understanding of what "good bread" is, but that hasn't dimmed my ardor for the stuff. When I buy whole-grain bread I look for words like "stone milled" and "whole grain"* and I check the ingredients to make sure whole grain is listed first. And, white or brown, I look for breads that have been fermented with a sourdough culture; the word "levain" indicates as much. And I stay away from any bread containing any ingredient that isn't the name of a grain or salt.

But I try to bake my own when I can, and I can see that I've gotten fairly improvisational in my baking. I never look at recipes anymore. Instead, I look at dough, and feel it, taste it, and smell it, almost continuously. I also check in every morning with my starter, gauging by eye and nose its happiness before feeding it a few tablespoons of fresh flour and water. When I started baking a few months ago, I could never have imagined the work would become such an intuitive and sensory process-or such an obsession-but there it is. Actually, baking has begun to feel a lot like gardening, a pastime, or practice, I've been working at much longer.

In my experience, gardening successfully depends on two different but related faculties, both highly relevant to baking. The first is the green thumb's ability to notice and absorb everything going on in his garden, from the precise tint of the leaves to the aroma of the soil. The data of your senses have more to tell you about the work than anything you can read in a book. The second is the green thumb's knack for imagining what his plants and soil want in order to be maximally happy and thrive. Same with baking bread: It helps to be able to think like a gra.s.s seed and, at the same time, like the community of yeasts and bacteria living in your sourdough culture. Control you can just forget about: There are too many interests and variables in play. (The dream of control is seductive, but it leads straight to monoculture in the field and fortified white bread in the supermarket.) Behind a great loaf of bread is a deft orchestration, not only of time and temperature, but also of a great many diverse species and interests, our own-for something nouris.h.i.+ng and delicious to eat-included. I am no maestro, no white thumb yet, but my bread is getting tastier, and airier, all the time.