You Are What You Wheat

Laura has invited me to make a guest appearance on the blog - I (Geof) am very excited to be here.

So the science requirements for my math degrees were surprisingly limited and my understanding of biology and chemistry and basically limited to what I had to learn in high school to get a B, but I think it's a generally true statement that we really are what we eat, at least on some level.  In fact, it's really a miracle of creation that a tiny baby will turn into essentially the same shape regardless of whether she is fed broccoli or "chicken" nuggets.  All this to say we Hilemans have been becoming increasingly aware of what we are putting into our bodies lately.

I've been on a year-long journey of food-related discoveries, starting last Easter when I resolved to lose some weight by counting calories.  It worked - I lost 15 pounds for good - and I started paying a lot more attention to the caloric content of my foods, but I wasn't looking at much else.  Since then, we've continued learning about our foods and former foods, including the horrors of ammonia-rinsed beef filler, artificial dyes, excess sugar of most varieties, and just today - maybe the worst of them all - mechanically separated chicken.  But I'll let you google all that on your own - I'm here today to talk about the Great Bread Project of 2011.

In the past month, we have begun milling our own wheat and subsequently turning that milled wheat (a.k.a. flour) into our everyday bread.  Why would we do such a thing?  Ultimately, it boils down to a lot of circumstantial evidence and a gut feeling that this is just what happens to be the right thing for our family right now.  There's no definitive scientific study to point to that proves this is better, but I'll share a little bit of what I've learned.

{hard red wheat berries}

First, what white bread (and lots of wheat bread) isn't.  There are three parts to a wheat berry - the bran (outer covering, loaded with nutrients), the germ (the innermost embryo that turns into new wheat plants), and the endosperm (the biggest part of the berry, very little nutritional value).  White flour is made from the endosperm only.  In fact, lots of wheat flour is also made from just the endosperm and then either colored or mixed with just enough whole grain flour to change the appearance and texture.  Whole grain breads are made from the entire berry, but with three important exceptions.  First, the berries are pressed to remove all the oils that will spoil flour after a few days.  From what I understand, there's good stuff in that oil.  Second, the exposure of the flour to air will oxidize the nutrients and destroy the vast majority of the nutritional value before you even pick up the sack of flour (or loaf of baked bread) at the grocery store.  Finally, commercial milling is performed at such a high temperature that more of the nutritional value is destroyed.  The home mill retains this nutritional value.

Proponents of home-milling cite all sorts of health benefits.  These range from digestive help (faithful readers will know that 20 percent of our family has an issue in this department), warts vanishing, allergies and asthma being alleviated, and improved colon health.  I don't KNOW if any of this is true, but I've seen no evidence to suggest home-milling has any negative effects.  It's like Pascal's Wager with food - the non-zero probability that it might keep me from dying of colon cancer like my grandfather did 20 years before I was born is enough to make me want to give it a shot.

Oh and one more little thing that is actual for-real fact.  The FDA has standards for the maximum amount of rat dung and dead insects that are permitted to be in commercial flour.  Being able to look at the wheat before it's ground up is a nice little side benefit.

{new staples in our pantry - flaxseed, wheat germ, gluten, and popcorn!}

Which brings me to my main point.  I love bread.  My love for bread predates even my love for Laura.  As a teenager, I was always happy to help put away the leftover bread from the dinner table.  I don't know if any slices ever found their way back to the bread box.  And do you know what's even better than eating bread?  Smelling fresh-baked bread in your house 3 or 4 times per week.  Almost makes me sad that there's half a loaf left over on the counter and I won't need to make any tonight!

{know what you get when you run popcorn through the mill?  Cornmeal!}

One more soap box and then I'll conclude with some frequently asked questions.  For thousands of years, people have eaten foods in their natural forms.  But in the last hundred years, we've gotten really good at modifying foods to make them more convenient, uniform, longer-lasting, and - most importantly - cheaper to manufacture.  During this same time period, we've gotten fat and seen all sorts of conditions' incidence rise.  Could it be that this super-convenient food of the modern age just isn't all that great for us?  Think we're smart enough to know better?  50 years ago we thought smoking was probably ok.

If you've read this far, a few things you might be wondering ...


What kind of equipment do you need?
We bought a tabletop grain mill (about the size of a mixer and the same noise as a 747 landing on your head shop-vac.  We are also realists and knew we wouldn't keep at this if we had to knead the bread by hand, so I bought a very nice bread machine by Zojirushi.  It makes real bread, not the silly bucket-shaped breads people associate with bread machines.

Where do you get the grain?
It's not very accessible, but it's around.  Whole Foods actually sells it by the pound, but that's not really the best place to get it in bulk.  So far we've been getting it from a wholesaler with a storefront in Wake Forest (www.thegrainmillwf.com).  We may explore a co-op that gets quarterly deliveries from Montana - it's slightly cheaper but also slightly less convenient.

{our two 35-lb buckets of hard red and hard white wheat berries}

Do the kids like it?
Absolutely.  They love it.  And why shouldn't they - it's BETTER!

Is it cheaper?
It's cheaper than commercially-available whole grain artisan bread.  It's probably more expensive than WonderBread, but hope I've made the point that it's a different animal.  I haven't calculated the exact cost because I keep tinkering with my basic recipe but I think it's probably in the vicinity of $1.75 for a 1.5 pound loaf.  I am sweetening the bread with high-quality honey as opposed to sugar, which probably accounts for $0.50 of the cost.

Can I try a slice?
Of course!  Stop by anytime and I'll be glad to prepare you a slice.  My current favorite is lightly toasted with peanut butter.

Do you still eat normal food?
Of course.  If you have occasion to feed us, don't worry that we've turned into wheat-crazed weirdos (that's just me).  Just don't be offended if I turn down your mechanically separated chicken.

Have you realized any benefits yet?
Yes!  In the month we've been eating this bread, not a single one of the five of us has contracted colon cancer!  And actually, we've been seeing significant progress with the three year-old's situation.  There's no way to clearly attribute it to the bread, but it can't be hurting.

Do you make anything besides bread with this grain?
Yep!  We've made killer pancakes a couple of times, homemade crackers that tasted surprisingly like Wheat Thins, passable bagels, ground popcorn to use as cornmeal, cinnamon rolls, pizza dough, and one loaf of banana bread.  We are anxiously awaiting a 50 pound sack of soft white wheat so we can make some biscuits and cookies.

 {and Geof}