to develop perennial commercial crops of wheat, sunflowers, and flax. He calls the initiative “High-Efficiency Agriculture.” Once planted, these crops will return naturally year after year. “Wheat is a grass, after all, and grass is perennial,” Wyse reminded me. These crops do not require tilling and planting, the major causes of soil erosion. They grow prolifically without doses of harmful chemicals. “Perennial wheat is a sustainable crop,” Wyse said. “Its root system becomes more robust through the years so that it can withstand floods and drought. These plants hold a lot of promise as real food, animal fodder, and biofuel.”
Is the flour from heritage and perennial wheat significantly better than that from commercial wheat, which at first seems far easier to plant, grow, harvest, and mill? Are the efficiencies created by our industrial system worth what it will take to change them? What is the price of plant diversity and food security; what is the price of our health? Most important, what is the price of flavor?
I sought an answer from Jeff Ford, founder of Cress Spring Bakery in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, near Madison. Ford has been profiled in the New York Times for his award-winning breads, made from the heritage grains he buys from neighboring farmers and grinds himself—einkorn, emmer and Turkey red. They are leavened naturally, not with industrial yeast, and baked in an enormous wood-burning oven built by the legendary mason Alan Scott.
Cress Spring is located off narrow County Road F, which winds through the piney hills in south central Wisconsin. It’s not easy to find. The location eluded Google Maps, and after several wrong turns, I pulled into the long and bumpy driveway, scattering geese and chickens away from the car and drawing out a few curious piglets that trotted to the edge of their pen. As I stepped out of my car, I was hit full on with the glorious, toasty, slightly sour scent of freshly baked bread.
I pushed open the door to a sunlit room lined with wire shelves of wicker baskets cuddling rising dough. On others, rows of dark oblong loaves and fat raisin-studded rolls, just out of the oven, were cooling.
Ford is tall and slender. His wispy gray curls, secured with a ponytail, were sprung around a yellow bandanna. Wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Serene and soft-spoken, he got his professional start in a Madison bakery as an accountant and then left nearly thirty-five years ago to build Cress Spring on communal farmland, constructing his bakery around the wall-sized oven. Wendell Berry-inspired and Rumi-quoting, Ford chops his own wood for the oven and buys all the ingredients for his breads and pastries from his neighbors and fellow farmer’s-market vendors.
Twice a week, on baking days, Ford grinds the grains to maximize nutrition and ensure freshness. The natural fermentation method he uses to create the starter that leavens the loaves makes them especially easy to digest. In comparison to yeasted dough that puffs up quickly and flavorlessly, Ford’s bread requires nearly twenty-four hours for its slow rise. The process imparts a sweet, complex acidity and changes the grain to make its nutrients more accessible to our bodies. Because the bread is made of such simple ingredients, it tends to last longer, too. The kamut-raisin and mixed-grain loaves I brought back to Minneapolis stayed fresh in a brown paper bag for about a week. Ford said that plastic traps in moisture and turns the bread moldy. “Bread needs to breathe,” he said.
Many of Cress Spring’s most devout customers come with wheat allergies and have found they can digest the kamut, spelt, and rye breads. Ford agrees with Jaradat and others that America’s wheat issues start on the farm. “The varieties of wheat are bred by industrial production to stand up to machines are all monoculture, chemicalized, and lack any nutritional value,” he said. “We feed people this stuff that their bodies are not designed or adapted to eat. Of course they’re sensitive to it, and it’s not good for them and causes problems.”
Over the years, Ford has intentionally reduced Cress Spring’s business to a more manageable scale, dropping wholesale sales to make more profitable home deliveries in his muddy blue truck. At the Madison Farmers’ Market, he always sells out of four hundred loaves. “Saturdays at the market, people tell me they love what we do and hand me money all day. At this point, it’s not work; it’s my social life,” he quips. Sure, these whole-grain, organic, locally sourced, naturally fermented, and gluten-sensitive loaves are nutritious, environmentally responsible, and supportive of the local economy. But the reason they sell out each week? Spring Cress loaves are burnished gold, their edges slightly burned; they are wheaten and fragrant, tooth tugging and tender, indescribably good.
Turkey red wheat is ground by Sunrise Flour Mill, in North Branch, Minnesota, and sold at the Mill City Farmers’ Market in Minneapolis. Darrold Glanville, Sunrise’s founder, opened a sack and spilled a few Turkey red kernels into my palm. Shiny, rich mahogany brown, they squirmed through my fingers and skittered to the floor as though alive. “When wheat is ground fresh, there’s a different quality to the flour,” he said. “It has distinct flavor and makes a very responsive dough. You’ll see when you make bread, how evenly the dough rises then springs up in the oven. Bakers call that ‘bounce’ and the loaves develop beautiful, firm crusts.”
“Fresh” is not a quality I associate with the five-pound bags of all-purpose white flour on grocery-store shelves. Darrold, a retired corporate executive, became interested in heritage grains when he realized that commercial bread was causing him digestive troubles. “I found a source for Turkey red wheat and began milling my own flour, giving it to friends, and eventually selling it in small batches. Pretty soon, the demand was so great, it grew into a business.” He opened a bag of his all-purpose flour. A pale golden color, it released an aroma of warm toast. “Not many farmers are willing to grow this wheat, so it’s hard for me to source and it’s expensive,” he said.
“Wheat is a seasonal food, like blueberries. The region, the variety, and the growing conditions, as well as freshness, all affect flavor and performance,” Glanville continued. “I can hardly keep up with the orders from home bakers, commercial bakeries and cafés, and restaurants.” Amazing—just like my favorite apples, or spring’s first peas, the taste of wheat will vary through the year. I’ve always thought of flour as a staple, a cheap commodity, and though I’d made bread for years, it wasn’t until I met Glanville and kneaded Sunrise flour into a springy dough that bounced to life in the oven that I understood the difference. Jeff Ford’s award-winning loaves are fashioned from the most humble ingredients—water, flour, and salt. Yet their true worth extends well beyond his remote bakery in rural Wisconsin.
Wheat is grown on more acreage than any other commercial crop in the world and continues to be the most important grain source for humans. Its production leads all crops, including rice, maize, and potatoes. Given its role in our diets and its place in our history, isn’t wheat worth our attention, time, technology, and resources to grow it well? We have the intelligence, if not the wisdom, to grow beautiful, bountiful wheat. How do we teach people the value of this reality?
Make them good bread.
There was nothing ordinary about my mother-in-law’s mashed potatoes. Betty Dooley whipped russet or Idaho bakers into fluffy mounds, turning them golden with plenty of butter and cream. Come summer, she steamed golf-ball-sized red potatoes to toss in a tangy mustard-dill dressing. Betty was a tiny woman with boundless energy who took potatoes seriously. A generation before, her “people” had fled Ireland for New Jersey to escape the potato blight.
The story of the potato famine provides one of the strongest arguments for preserving genetic diversity. In the eighteenth and early
