A new wave of grain | Hacker News Reader

A new wave of grain

boulderweekly.com

50 pointsindigodaddy37 comments

> “The public we were serving, in a broad sense, said, ‘We’re organic, we’re healthy, we’re vegan, we’re whole-grain,’ and then we’d roll out these whole-grain breads. … Everyone would say, ‘Woohoo!’ and then they’d show up and say, ‘I’ll take the baguette. I’ll take the ciabatta.’”

I think part of the problem is that after 100+ years of increasingly industrialized bread, most people today have rarely if ever encountered "real" bread (including bread that is actually 100% whole-grain). I can't find a citation at the moment, but I've heard from multiple sources that in the US, commercial bread only needs to contain 51% whole wheat to be able to be marketed as "whole wheat". So in reality when you see "100% Whole Wheat" on the shelf, most times it's really more like a blend of white and whole wheat (plus a whole bunch of other preservatives and other junk). If you actually bake a loaf at home with only whole-wheat flour you will get something that is much darker and denser.

There has been a similar phenomenon with "rye" bread in the US. Most bread labeled "rye" that you see on store shelves here is a variant of a deli-style bread originating in NYC. It is mostly white wheat flour with a little bit of rye flour and caraway seed added. The flavor people associate with "rye" bread is really just the flavor of caraway seed. In contrast, true whole-grain rye bread is a very dense old-world style bread that you almost never see anymore except for maybe in very niche artisan bakeries. Example: https://i.redd.it/bhwihp6j7dr01.jpg

> So in reality when you see "100% Whole Wheat" on the shelf, most times it's really more like a blend of white and whole wheat (plus a whole bunch of other preservatives and other junk).

If you see the "100%" it will use all whole wheat flour. Simply stating "whole wheat" could mean different things.

There are multiple efforts to improve the labeling surrounding all this. Here's one: https://wholegrainscouncil.org/whole-grains-101/identifying-...

> Even Walmart’s “Great Value 100% Whole Wheat Bread” contains seven ingredients that Whole Foods considers “unacceptable”: high fructose corn syrup, sodium stearoyl lactylate, ethoxylated diglycerides, DATEM, azodicarbonamide, ammonium chloride, and calcium propionate.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_...

To be clear, white bread is thousands if not tens of thousands of years old. I don't see how the 300 year old baguette could be considered "not real".

I wasn’t trying to imply they weren’t, but I see how the wording of my comment could make it seem that way. I was commenting on the perception of “whole grain” based on supermarket brands marketed as such. Traditional baguettes are by far better than anything made in a factory.

Our regular Supermarket has racks and racks of different kinds of bread and they're all horrible fluff. Its great when you find "normal" bread, but you have to make the effort to go to the niche places.

Or make your own :) It's time-consuming but quite therapeutic

It's not even time consuming if you get a bread machine and, if you care to, a slicer.

Are there mechanical slicers out there that are affordable for home use? Last I looked the cheapest I could find was like $1,500 USD.

For a device like this[1] or this[2]?

[1]https://www.lidl.de/media/product/0/0/8/6/2/9/1/wenko-brotsc...

[2]http://www.umwaagen.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BS_38.jpg

Use a good very sharp kitchen knife for 100$ don’t use a bread knife. Perfect slices no work.

We had "real" bread for millennia. We didn't forget about it, we actively chose something new. Humans absolutely love refined, glutiney, sweet, white flour. It's like the wheat equivalent of candy. We also love soda. It's not like we forgot about tea, people just like soda more.

By the way, have you made bread with just wheat flour? It won't rise. I have to add a bunch more water too to give the dough the right consistency. Anything more than 50% wheat flour and in the oven it's just not going to get big. You could probably add vital wheat gluten, but if you have to use more than flour, salt, yeast and water, it isn't "bread" to me anymore, it's a "baked good".

>By the way, have you made bread with just wheat flour?

Several times a week, every week.

>It won't rise.

Yes it will.

>Anything more than 50% wheat flour and in the oven it's just not going to get big

Use a whole wheat bread recipe, don't use a white bread recipe and just swap in whole wheat flour.

>but if you have to use more than flour, salt, yeast and water, it isn't "bread" to me anymore

Almost all bread has more than that. Sweetener and fat are both normal.

I'm not really making a case here one way or another about what people should eat, just trying to explain the gap observed between what people think they are buying and what they are actually getting. I don't think we should call things "100% whole wheat" when it is far from that. We're just deluding people at that point. If people prefer factory "bread" that's fine but they should at least know what it actually is.

> By the way, have you made bread with just wheat flour?

Yes, regularly. It is more difficult to obtain a good rise and pleasant texture but it is 100% doable with proper techniques. It takes a lot of time and effort. To each his own though.

We had "real" bread for millennia. We didn't forget about it, we actively chose something new.

Kinda. Witness the reaction of people who've eaten nothing but grocery store white bread to a nice piece of artisan bread. Also, Paul Newman used to quip, "Why go out for hamburger, when you have steak at home?" The answer to that, is that it's far easier to package, prepare, and distribute the hamburger.

We also love soda. It's not like we forgot about tea, people just like soda more.

The same goes for soda. Also, to bring it back around to Paul Newman, I also chased around some women who were clearly bad for me in retrospect. What people want is different in different contexts, over different timescales, at different ages. What you really want might be a little different than what you'd choose when just being your "id." (Cookie Monster is just the id personified. I think of Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Bert as id, ego, and superego.)

Interestingly though, I remember a big cultural change in the UK back in the 1970s. The bread industry then was dominated by few manufacturers and their sliced white bread.

For some reason, a wave of strikes hit these manufacturers very badly; I remember there being queues to buy bread. One of the side effects was that people found that the sliced white was sold out and there was only this weird "granary" wholemeal stuff left on the shelves. Granary became a lot more popular, and its popularity held up after the strikes ended.

It ushered in an early interest in different kinds of seedy bread.

Soda, sweetened bread, and very sweet food in general aren't just automatically better tasting. To an extent, it's an acquired taste.

When I was a kid I drank more soda than water. I still love the taste of Coke, but now that I don't drink it often, more than a small bottle is too much. It's not just Coke either--a lot of foods that I used to love are just too sweet now that I'm not acclimated to them.

It's the same for many of my friends and family who are from other cultures that don't consume quite as much sugar as we do in the US--they think everything here is too sweet.

Indeed, US (and latin american) bread tastes weirdly sweet to my European taste buds, and not in a good way! We don't put sugar in bread here at all (except maybe very cheap bread, and of course sweet breads like brioche).

We (my family) grind our own wheat and make real 100% wheat bread all the time. We get it to rise and be fluffy just fine FWIW. And I don't like soda or white bread nearly as much as water and wheat. Sure maybe I'm not typical, but I don't think we can attribute our culture's like of soda to more than, well, culture.

What do you use for a grinder? I’ve been itching to get into milling my own flour for a while. I hear it takes the bread to a whole new level.

Usually this: https://nutrimill.com/product/nutrimill-classic-grain-mill/ . But occasionally this when I want a workout: https://store.countrylivinggrainmills.com/grain-mill/

I've found Peter Reinhart's methods to produce an easy, consistent, extremely tasty and well-risen whole grain bread. It does require letting the dough soak overnight.

Soaking/extended autolyse is definitely helpful. And just using a lot more water overall.

Also if you have a coarse-ground flour you can also sift out the bran, soak it separately and fold it into the dough later, which allows the gluten to develop a bit without getting cut by the bran. That’s kind of a pain though so I don’t usually do it.

That kind of dense rye bread was also available at ALDI. Haven't been there in several years as they only operate in the Eastern United States.

Once you start eating Einkorn loafs, you won't want to eat any other kind of bread. I lightly toast my slices and add just a little butter, and it really is like nothing else you've ever had.

Research into Perennial grains has made some exciting progress recently as well. Blue Salish and Kernza are the ones I've heard about.

What is the purpose exactly? Everything I can find about it is just hand wavey "its good for the environment because reasons".

No need to till, better drought tolerance.

There's no need to till with any other grain either, the majority of grain is farmed no-till already. Is there any actual evidence of better drought tolerance, or is that just assumed based on the misconception that perennials are more drought tolerant than annuals?

Growing grains requires:

Prep soil -> Plant -> Wait -> Harvest

Perennial grains would allow you to do the prep and plant once, and then repeat the last two steps multiple times. Prep, Planting, and Harvest are all similar orders of magnitude of labor, so if you can get ~ 5 years from a single planting, you could work an area of land with less than half the total labor.

Less soil prep and planting (with heavy machinery) means less soil erosion, less microbiome destruction, healthier soil.

>Prep soil

That's not required at all. Most grain is grown no-till, you seed directly through the residue of the previous crop. This is the typical problem, people researching solutions to problems that don't actually exist. Why are agricultural researchers completely unfamiliar with basic farming practices?

>you could work an area of land with less than half the total labor.

And get less food from it because the grain has such a low yield. You're burning fewer gallons of diesel per calorie of food produced to grow normal wheat than any of the perennial grains they have come up with so far.

>Less soil prep and planting (with heavy machinery) means less soil erosion, less microbiome destruction, healthier soil

But we solved that problem decades ago, solving it again but worse isn't very useful.

It seems like you've already made up your mind, so not sure why I'm bothering, but...

>Most grain is grown no-till

I don't think this is accurate for wheat.

> food produced to grow normal wheat than any of the perennial grains they have come up with so far

A brand new innovation is less efficient that an existing tech that has existed for centuries? Crazy.

> But we solved that problem decades ago

We've solved soil destruction? What?

I didn't understand the quote: "with 14 chromosomes einkorn has less gluten". Gluten is an expressed protein, I don't see how the number of chromosomes an organism has correlates with its gluten content, unless gluten proteins are directly involved in some sort of DNA-related process. But even then I thought the number of chromosomes doesn't necessarily correlate with the amount of generic material (that is, it's just how it is divided up). Can someone explain this to me?

Maybe referring to gene expression. Einkorn is a tetraploid meaning it has 4 copies of each gene. Compared with hexaploids which have 6 genes. More genes may mean higher protein expression. In some cases.

I think you may be right. I also found this when googling "chromosomes gluten", which recurringly refers to the 14 chromosomes and gluten content but doesn't give any reason why:

https://www.einkorn.com/3-reasons-einkorn-may-be-easier-to-d...

"This study, shows that Einkorn has 10% less amylose than it’s closest cousin, Emmer and 20% less than Rye. It makes me wonder what it would be compared to modern wheat! In addition, the chromosomal count of Einkorn is a simple 14 compared to modern wheat of 42. As the chromosomes of modern wheat has increased, so has the modern wheat berry’s physical size. In ratio to that Amylose and Amylopectin has increased also. Modern wheat has been found to contain 75% Amylopectin."

I have a feeling they are correlated due to seed size but the number of chromosomes isn't causative.

I'm lucky to live in a city with a bakery that is devoted to whole heritage grains. They will their flour sourcing from local producers.

Seylou in Washington DC.

http://www.seylou.com

_side note:_ the way the header navigation of the linked site comes back into view on scroll-up is much more pleasant than the typical "jump down" effect. Still think the need for the header on scroll up is a bit absurd but hey, this is the best implementation I've seen.

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