TRITICUM, VARIOUS SPECIESLike many people who grew up in the mid-20th century, I grew up on Wonder Bread—or its ilk—and knew little about other kinds
of wheat breads. Yes, there was something called cracked wheat bread, which seemed to be white bread with some cracked grains and bran added. And there was rye bread. And that was it.
Oh, how far we’ve come since then. Within a few miles of my home, I can find several sources of rich loaves made of organic whole-wheat flour, leavened with starter cultures of native yeasts and bacteria that float through the air just looking for warm, wet pools of spring water and wheat flour to colonize and exalt. These loaves are baked in ovens fired with dried splits of native oak. The smell of the bread! The look of it! The taste! The texture! If bread is the staff of life, then these loaves make it worth living.
Wheat is a grass, as are many other of our common grains such as oats, barley, and corn. We use the seeds of this grass to make our flour. The seeds—or wheatberries, as they’re called—grow in heads inside dry husks called chaff. (Chaff is itchy stuff, as I found out when the teenage sons of my farmer neighbor threw me in the chaff bin in their barn when I was 10.) The wheatberries themselves are covered with a fibrous coat of bran. Under the bran is the white starchy grain and its germ, the living part of the grain. When a wheatberry sprouts, the germ sends out a small root. The starchy part of the grain is food for this growing seedling.
During milling, if the whole wheatberry—bran, germ, and starch—is all ground into flour, you have very nutritious whole-wheat flour. If the germ and bran are removed, the white starchy part of the berry makes unbleached white flour, which is far less nutritious. If the flour is bleached to make bleached white flour, avoid it. It’s just too far removed from the natural grain and too devoid of its nutritional potential.
THE ORGANIC FACTOR
Tests at the Danish Research Center for Organic Farming show that organic wheat fertilized with green manure or cow manure has better baking characteristics than conventional wheat grown with chemical nitrogen fertilizers. The gluten in the organically fertilized wheat, researchers found, has more elasticity and holds carbon dioxide better than that in conventional wheat. Chemical fertilizers are shown to promote quick, lush, but ultimately weak plant tissue.
NUTRITION
Whole-wheat flour is a nutritious protein, although one lacking in the amino acid lysine. (By combining wheat with legumes—lentils or beans—you have a meal complete in necessary protein, with no need for meat.) Whole-wheat flour also has good stores of iron, fiber, potassium, calcium, the B vitamins, and especially folate. Processed white flours show reduced amounts of nutrients; for example, white flour has half the folate of whole wheat.
TYPES
About 90 percent of the wheat grown in the world is bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), mainly adapted to temperate climates. Various strains of this wheat are planted in the spring for harvest in late summer (spring wheat) or planted in the fall to overwinter and ripen in early summer (winter wheat). Kernels of bread wheat vary in color from yellow (called white) to reddish-brown (called red). ....read more
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