The last weeks have been an expansion of my sourcing of wheat berries, this time to the heartland of America with some Heirloom Turkey Red from Breadtopia. I had not heard of Turkey Red until  a couple weeks ago when I came across an article on Sunrise Flour Mills that spoke highly of the grain for making a nice bread flour. This wheat, introduced to the Great Plains by Mennonites from Russia/Crimea around 1870, used to be widely grown in the Midwest, but fell out of favor after new engineered modern varietals took hold of the wheat industry and public tastes. If you are bored, you should read this article, Turkey Wheat: The Cornerstone of an Empire (a little dramatic of a title though).

These particular Turkey Red berries come from Heartland Mills, although there is no more information about the particular farm. I have my first bread experiment with Turkey Red flour in progress, but thought I would share this short video (my first) of the milling.

For this fairly hard grain, I set the mill at a slightly roughly setting resulting in a fine light meal texture that looked perfect for a long fermented rustic loaf.

The video cuts out a little at the end. my wife is constantly running out of memory on her phone due to an insane number of baby photos and videos being texted on any given day. I was just about to explain that the sifter is #50 mesh and does a great job of producing a fine flour with more extracted bran than my previous sifter.

Here is a gratuitous photo of baby playing with bags of grain. A future miller maybe.

I have delayed writing this post because I am still mad at myself for failing to take good pictures. To be fair to myself, I was preparing for a gathering of new parents and babies (my wife volunteered our house for a Sunday brunch). Between cleaning and trying to prepare some other basic food stuffs (pickled onions and a baked oat dish), I had really been dying to try making some rye crispbread. A great opportunity for testing new breads on unknowing, bedraggled parents.

Of course this starts with milling up some fresh rye flour. I have found I prefer to mill most grains at just a couple clicks above the finest setting when making general rising breads. I have been calling this medium-fine. 

Rye itself has been a favorite supplemental flour for a variety of flatbreads I have been tinkering around with. I find it adds a bit of tanginess. It also has the benefit of high enzymatic activity, which builds a fast growing yeast culture. Rye is kind of an interesting grain, known in fancy science terms as secale cereale, in the triticeae tribe (the category below family/sub–family). Boring stuff, but I kind of like knowing the relationship between the grains in a biological sense, which I may just bore my 10 readers with a little more later. This site, Gramene, is sort of amazing for info on the biology of grasses.

Rye crispbread recipe:

150 grams whole rye flour/ 150 grams high extraction blend of hard red and soft white flour (a sort of custom all-purpose flour I am starting to use more of–I need to do some gluten testing to get some better insight into the effect of different blend ratios).

50 grams of rye/whole-purpose blend poolish, with a dash of active dry yeast.

roughly 50% hydration (I lost track of accurate measurement in adjusting to get the dough to feel right).

about 2 Tablespoons maple syrup.

1 Tablespoon light toasted and coarse ground caraway seed.

3 grams dry yeast

pinch of kosher salt

After a short autolyse, I gave the dough a light knead and left covered overnight in the fridge. The next morning I let the cold dough warm and rise at room temperature and cut it into 50 gram rounds, which I let relax before rolling to the thickness of heavy paper. I then pushed in some more caraway seed and brushed with water before baking for 7 minutes at 450 degrees. The crispbreads aren’t complete dry at that point, so they need about 10 more minutes at 200 degrees after cooling. Sprinkled with Utah Basin Salt.

Rising dough pictured below.

Sadly, because I simply forgot there are no pictures of the final product, but the crispbreads came out both beautiful and tasty.

Please be appeased by this picture of my daughter picking out a record (only partially staged). It turns out that almost all the parents cancelled due to baby sickness and, more likely, a playoff football game.

More crackers for me.

The history of humankind is intertwined with the domestication of grain. It is a search for value in our shared ancient roots and a connection to our food that draws people back to the original wheat varieties, eikhorn and emmer.  Recognition of these “ancient grains” continues to get more and more attention. Last month, the NYTimes had a great article, “Bread is Broken,” that looked at the failure of the modern industrialized grain-to-flour market to produce something worth eating. As the values of modernism and its faith in mass commodification loses it hold on our culinary ethos, looking back is the only way forward. There is nothing new, only reinvention and discovering anew how to eat and live with purpose.

What better way live, than with emmer crispbreads and cheese.

Also known under its Italian name of farro, the berries makes a great grain for risotto-like (farotto) dishes and a compliment to hearty greens. This is how I have typically been using my emmer berry supply.

As a flour, emmer mills to a medium soft flour with a yellow/tan earthen tone and a hearty wheat bite.

After milling the flour, the crispbread dough was emmer flour, tarragon water (50%), emmer poolish (25%). I made the tarragon water by steeping dry tarragon the day before. I love tarragon and thought it would be a add a subtle herbal flavor to he cracker. (Spoiler: it didn’t work, the wheatiness of emmer overwhelmed any herbal notes.)

I used a fairly standard process for the dough, using a day old emmer poolish and long autolyse. I gave it some generous kneading to help build a solid gluten structure and let it rise overnight in the refrigerator. The gluten in emmer is weak, but for making crispbreads I was concerned less with rising than holding a nice tensity when rolled out.

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The final product was two batches of nice crispbreads. I pushed flax seeds into the second batch before baking, which added some nice texture and a fancy look. My wife like this version better because it was rolled slightly thinner (on purpose) and also less burnt (on accident, as I left the first batch in a minute or two too long and it got a little toasted). It is always a victory when my wife likes anything I make. She likes a lot of my creations, but the look on her face when something is mediocre is both telling and heartbreaking.

I was talking with a friend that I hadn’t seen in a while and mentioned my new found interest in milling fresh flour, in particular my experiments with fresh pasta. He recommended that I check out Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli and sent me a copy. (He also suggested I start making prosciutto in my basement.)

A fascinating read and a departure from the usual cookbook. Rather than a collection of recipes, Bertolli delves deep into ingredients and food making. Flour and pasta making being just one. Not once in all of my various cookbook perusing have I ever encountered anything that truly tried to get to the heart of quality pasta. A good cookbook gives you ideas and inspiration, while making you feel inadequate at the same time. So many things to try and so little time.

As the weather turns, hearty fresh pasta starts to sounds good again. These changes in my sentiments (culinary and otherwise) remind me how close we are to the patterns of the planet and our particular place on it, despite our constructive attempts at distance. Fresh pasta, like bread, is simple in idea, yet varies incredibly on fine differences of texture, water content, and the quality of your ingredients. I have never been satisfied with the fresh pasta I have made. At its worst, it tasted like boiled card stock. At its best, it tasted like fresh pasta.

In all the months I have been playing around with my fresh-milled flour, fresh pasta had not occurred to me as a good use. I blame the weather for this oversight. Looking at the last few Kamut berries sitting around, I thought that rather than bread, this stuff was better for a durum fresh egg pasta.

I decided not to use all Kamut flour, and blended it 50/50 with some Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose. It always feels a little like cheating when I pull out my commercial flour, but I wanted to really see what the Kamut flour would do to my regular recipe. (Not so much a recipe, really just following a standard process and mixing and kneading until it feels right.)

Here is my dough ball. It kind of refused to get nice and smooth, but the feel was right.

After relaxing the dough, I rolled it out by hand.  (At the end of last winter, I tossed my old cheap roller machine, swearing I would get a fancy new one. Still looking.) The dough held up beautifully, with little sticking or tearing.

Cut into pappardelle and tied into knots to dry. I ended up refrigerating it overnight, as my wife and I went out. 

Final product for eating: A simple ground pork ragu, with fennel, mushrooms, and a little tomato. The pasta was great. For the first time, I can say that my pasta had tooth and flavor. You could have eaten it with almost nothing on it, like true good pasta. The part still lacking is the quality of the eggs. I need to find somebody raising chickens that hatch eggs with deep yellow-orange yolks, rather than these pale yellow heartless blobs (and these are pricey free-range eggs). Looking at the yolks in David Lebovitz’s photos makes me think America has a chicken egg problem.

Kamut flour has earned my respect back. Time to go buy some more berries and hunker down for a long, damp Seattle winter.