Oh to be young and free. Munchies, a website, reminisces about the Great Anti-Popcorn Hysteria of 1994. That was when the Centre for Science in the Public Interest announced that movie popcorn was very high in saturated fats, a revelation that was met with screaming headlines and a large — but very temporary — drop in cinema popcorn sales.
But while Munchies has the giggles poking fun at the whole episode, boring old me remembered another story, the one about popcorn lung and – like popcorn itself – once I started in on it, I just couldn’t stop. You can share my discoveries by reading the newsletter online.
In other news, the FDA is not allowed to define “the food commonly known as eggs”. Modern Farmer tells me so. Who knows what lurks behind that. Does that mean that an eggless emulsion of fats and liquids could in fact declare that it contained eggs if it weren’t trying to appeal to vegans?
In truth, the best time to caramelize onions is yesterday. … [T]hrow the onions in a crock pot and go to bed. In recipe time, that’s hours and hours. In your time, the time that matters, it’s less than five minutes.
That’s exactly how I feel about making my own bread. It takes a long time, but it is’t my time.
Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing. I happened to be in Washington DC just a couple of weeks after his new bakery had opened, and despite all the work that goes into getting a new bakery up and running, Jonathan graciously agreed to sit down and chat.
Gluten
Jonathan impressed me with his live-and-let-live attitude to people who want to be gluten-free. I can only imagine how depressing it must be to have people shun the food you have dedicated your life to making. As he said, “I’m not a poison dealer”. But it did add to the motivation to pursue long fermentations and 100% whole grain flour, which does seem overall to make breads more digestible.
The Goods
Seylou is open from Wednesday to Sunday and was shut on the day I visited, so there was no chance to try anything. A couple of weeks later we went back for a coffee and something to eat, the proof of the pudding and all that. I was truly blown away. The whole grain croissant was an astonishing revelation. I simply could not imagine anything made of whole wheat could be so light and airy and yet so flavoursome. Same goes for the millet cookie. If I hadn’t been told, I’m sure I would never have guessed that it wasn’t wheat, and it had none of the self-righteous heftitude that “good-for-you” goods often have.
Seylou wholewheat croissant; just remembered to snap it before scarfing it down.
The bread I tried at my friend’s house. It was obviously not as light as a croissant, nor would I have wanted it to be, but it was moist and chewy and again incredibly tasty. Also, filling. A single slice mid-morning took me well into the afternoon.
Seylou’s spelt and emmer loaf.
As a bread baker myself, perhaps the secret is in the difference between harder and softer wheats, as Jonathan said, and how softer wheats result in bigger flecks of bran, which can make getting a good open crumb more difficult. In Italy I’ll often demonstrate the presence of bran in wholewheat flour by sifting a small sample, leaving the bran behind. When I tried that recently with some high-quality US-milled wholewheat, there was almost no bran left behind. It had been truly pulverised. I’m still a ways away from buying a home mill, but now I’m wondering; if I sifted my Italian flour for a bake and blitzed the bran in a food processor, would that make for a lighter loaf?
Varieties
You might imagine that an artisanal baker who talks about respect for the farmers and all they do for the land and for their grains would be using only ancient heirloom varieties, handed down from one generation to the next and tightly adapted to the farms on which they grow. You’ld be right, but only partly so. One variety Jonathan bakes with is probably at least 200 years old. Another was born yesterday.
Turkey Red is a really old variety with a murky origin story, even after it reached the US. Some say that it was first planted in 1874 in Kansas by immigrant German-Russian farmers fleeing conscription in the Crimea, who brought it with them in their suitcases, trunks and special chests. Others credit a single farmer – Bernhard Warkentin – a German-speaking Mennonite from what is now Ukraine, who arrived in Kansas in the early 1870s scouting for good places to grow wheat. His father was a miller who had introduced Turkey Red to the area around Odessa in the Crimea, though nobody knows its history before that. While the early immigrants may have grown a little Turkey Red on their arrival, in 1885 and again in 1900 Warkentin was charged with importing “several thousand bushels of new seed” of Turkey Red from Crimea.
The variety became one of the foundations of the breadbasket states of the USA and a vital part of the economy of Kansas, but starting in the 1940s new, high-yielding varieties pushed it out to just a few small fields, the province of hobby farmers. In 2009 Slow Food USA added it to the Ark of Taste and that heralded something of a rennaissance, with Turkey Red finding new places to grow, close enough to Washington DC for Jonathan to consider it local.
Appalachian White sounds as it if could have much the same back story, but it’s ancestry is very different, and much better known. Its parents are KS2016-U2 and Lakin, themselves both relatively modern Kansas varieties, crossed deliberately to create a hard white winter wheat that would thrive in the eastern United States, where the climate is much damper than on the plains. The USDA released it to farmers in 2010 and it is now being grown quite widely in North Carolina and Virginia. Not as glamorous as Turkey Red, but also much more useful to farmers, millers and bakers on the east coast, especially those who want organic, local flour, which is exactly what the USDA breeders had in mind.
More
It was an article on NPR’s The Salt that first brought Seylou Bakery to my attention, followed after a bit of digging by a slightly earlier piece in The Washington Post. And here are three links to pieces in which Jonathan (and others) share what they know about baking good bread:
I built up quite a backlog over the holidays, some of which I’m editing out because their moment has passed. Maybe next year I’ll dredge up the history of the potato latke. So let’s get going.
Something a bit seasonal. What if we let a social scientist who understands human foibles design a tool to promote weight loss? Dan Ariely and his team have done just that.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Measuring harvests is hard. Latest case in point, a clash between India’s Ministry of Agriculture and an analyst who cares what people actually ought to eat, according to India’s Institute of Nutrition.
I’m not enamoured of chicken wings myself, but apparently Americans are, and prices have been climbing steadily. As a result of which – and this is the weird bit – “many restaurants boosted menu prices and began offering boneless wings, which are usually chunks of white meat doused in familiar sauces and spices”.
Ask the internet “who invented mayonnaise?” and likely as not you’ll still be told it was a French chef after the battle of Mahon in 1756. Lacking cream, he whipped up an emulsion of egg yolks, oil and vinegar. How that was supposed to substitute for cream, history does not record. But then, history does not record the actual event either. It’s fake news of the finest kind.
Tom Nealon sets the record as straight as possible in his book Food Fights and Culture Wars. We talked about mayonnaise on the show, but when I asked Tom for his favourite story, that wasn’t it. This was.
Egg is to bacon as orange juice is to coffee. Smoked salmon is to dill as lamb is to asparagus. South Asian is to rice as Southern European is to thyme.
Just three of the relationships that Jaan Altosaar, a graduate student at Princeton University, uncovered in his research on machine learning and food. But when we had finished talking about the recommendation engine Jaan built, we moved on to some of his own personal food preferences. That was an eye opener for me.
Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing. I happened to be in Washington DC just a couple of weeks after his new bakery had opened, and despite all the work that goes into getting a new bakery up and running, Jonathan graciously agreed to sit down and chat. 
Ask the internet “who invented mayonnaise?” and likely as not you’ll still be told it was a French chef after the battle of Mahon in 1756. Lacking cream, he whipped up an emulsion of egg yolks, oil and vinegar. How that was supposed to substitute for cream, history does not record. But then, history does not record the actual event either. It’s fake news of the finest kind.
Egg is to bacon as orange juice is to coffee. Smoked salmon is to dill as lamb is to asparagus. South Asian is to rice as Southern European is to thyme.