wholegrainsurf: The ultimate bread and water diet.

For the 100th anniversary of the Sherman Experiment Station: They had a nursery of historical crops grown there over the last 100 years. I was asked to bake from what grain/flour I could glean of some of the historical wheat varieties [and barley].

I baked wholewheat sourdough loaves in a traditional style made from stone-ground wholewheat flours with the coarse bran [>850 um] sieved out.

Norwest553 - one of ours; a modern semi-dwarf hard red winter (HRW) . Made good bread; its very strong dough properties make it a great choice for wholewheat products made by long fermentation processes. A robust flavored HRW.

Turkey - a HRW introduced to Kansas only a few miles from Elizabeth's family farm. Origin Turkey/Ukraine. Made good bread; the dough was a bit tender to too much molding. Also a robust flavored HRW, not much different in flavor profile to the Norwest553 bread.

Red Fife - an old hard red spring [HRS]. A parent of "Marquis", the foundation variety of the Canadian western HRS industry. Made good bread; but the dough was very tender to too much molding and mixing. The least robust flavored of these red wheats; suggesting other attributes other than being grown in the 19th century, in terms of the grain's contribution to bread flavor.

Red May - a very old soft red winter. Grown in the east and grown in Kansas prior to the introduction of the hard wheats, which were more winter hardy. This made a dense bread with a crumbly non-resilient crumb typical of breads made from soft wheats. It also took about 10% les water and even then the dough was close to being unhandleablt sticky. This isn't ideal for making bread, but was a lesson to me in what was available for breadmaking in the era prior to 1860. Elizabeth made cookies out of it from a old "White House Cookbook" recipe from the 1890s - a far more appropriate product for this wheat.

Spelt and Emmer: These ancient wheats were still grown in yield trials at the station until the 1930s. The milled nicely and as expected had tender, rather fragile doughs, susceptible to overwork, but with proper attention made nice bread in this style. Both type, especially the emmer, had unique flavor profiles, very robust, but qualitatively distinct from all the modern hexaploids we baked.

Hard white winter blend: In deference to the hard white wheats grown in the region mostly before 1940. Including the Australian varieties "Baart" and "Federation" which had a considerable acreage. This was a less strong dough than the Norwest553, comparable to the Turkey, but it milled very granular from the stone-mill. The bread had the least robust flavor profile of all these breads, as expected. Some will like this flavor better for wholewheat products, but basically it depends to some extent on wheat consumers are used to.

ORSS1757/Skiles: Modern soft white winter wheats bred by our program. We made cookies out of these, as appropriate to the class of wheat. The cookies were fractionally, but noticably more tender the the Red May cookies.

We also made a bread dough out of this blend for the Summer Ag Institute. It was very notable that after about 2 hours of bulk fermentation that the dough had started to "pin-hole" leaving the fermentation gases to vent to atmosphere instead of being trapped by in dough [as with the bread wheats; the contrast was striking]. The pin-holing showed the weakness [literally] of the soft whites for bread making; and you could track at which point the dough stopped rising.

Front to rear: Each different cut pattern in turn: Turkey Red, Red Fife, Red May, a multigrain made with Norwest553 and grains of many of the elaternative crops tried at the station over the last 100 years [barley; millet; buckwheat; rye; & flax]

Summer Ag Institute: Baked contrasts: long v short fermentation baguettes [standard roler-milled bread flour]; red versus white wholewheat sourdoughs; and of course strong versus weak doughs as noted above. Lots of fun.

Wholewheat sourdoughs for the Summer Ag Institute: losest - Hard White, cross-hatched - Norwest553; rear - Turkey

Beautiful tasteless short fermentation baguettes rear; rather ugly looking but tasty [very] long fermentation "pain a al ancienne" a la Peter Reinhart front.