It remained the most popular variety until Today, around 50 percent of Kansas winter wheat varieties claim Turkey Red as part of their pedigree. Posted October 13, News Radio interviews. Archive But the white flour used during that era was not the white flour of contemporary times.
One of the major differences comes from how the wheat was processed into flour. Wheat is made ready for milling after the harvest and the separation of the wheat from the chaff. The rudiments of milling date back thousands of years. In traditional milling, grain is crushed between two large stones. The English word molar comes from the Latin mola for mill, so molars are the "little mills in our mouths," according to Tom Kelleher, Old Sturbridge Village's curator of historic trades and a wealth of information on milling.
For several hundred years, American gristmills used this ancient principle to process grain. Small grist grain mills dotted the countryside wherever the volume of water and drop in elevation in the body of water allowed waterpower to be harnessed.
Otsego County around Cooperstown , for instance, had 70 gristmills in the s. Such small local mills provided a service to nearby farmers and anyone else who brought in grain to be milled. The miller charged a small toll in kind, set by state law. Besides these local community mills, "merchant mills" added value to grain to be sold in cities or shipped further away.
These mills purchased grain from the farmers and sold flour by the barrel as a commodity. In the late s, flourmills concentrated between Baltimore and Wilmington, Delaware, to serve the mid-Atlantic grain belt and the Caribbean export market. Later, the Erie Canal facilitated the development of a new milling hub around Rochester, New York, using watercourses like the Genesee River.
Rochester acquired the nickname "Flour City. But by , the milling capital had moved west once again to Minneapolis. Eventually Rochester decided it was time to celebrate a new identity as the "Flower City" as grain and flour production moved westward. Few Americans today have ever seen fresh, stone-ground flour.
Newly milled even if much or most of the bran has been sifted out , this flour is not white, but rather yellowish with a light greenish cast.
This coloration comes mainly from flecks of wheat germ, the oil- and protein-rich part of the seed that germinates into a new plant. In the s, skillful millers knew how to process wheat so that the bran—the less—digestible outer coating of the grain—came off in big flakes. This allowed the bran to be more easily separated from the starchy endosperm—the white flour fraction of the wheat. Stone millers did not have the means to remove the wheat germ. But one of the realities of stone milling is that some bran inevitably slips through, and some of the starchy endosperm sticks to flakes of bran and is lost.
The condition of the grain and of the millstones both make a difference. The grain has to be tempered to the right moisture content: too wet and milling turned it to mush; too dry and the bran becomes brittle and breaks into tiny pieces. Very hard stone was selected for fabricating millstones, especially those used for grinding fine flour as opposed to animal feed or meal. These millstones ranged from 3 to 7 feet in diameter, with a stationary bottom millstone paired with another millstone revolving above.
At one time, millstones were quarried in large numbers of local rock in and around Esopus in Ulster County.
Imported French burrstones, though, were considered the best. Keeping the millstones "sharp" was a necessity—the groove in the stone has to be dressed in a slow, tedious process. Many millers owned two or more pairs of stones so they could keep milling even after one pair got dull. Once wheat was ground, the "entire" meal could be sifted to remove the bran and make it into "white" flour. Early American mills and the more basic rural mills left this step—called bolting—for the housewife to do at home.
She used her own discretion to determine how much of the bran to sift out, and fed the extra ban to livestock. By the early s, many mills had installed bolting equipment so they could refine or "whiten" the flour. The prolific early American inventor Oliver Evans introduced further advances in the pursuit of white flour. Traditionally, millers sent grain through their gristmills only once.
Evans advocated "progressive breaking and bolting," or "making middlings," to increase the yield of white flour from each bushel of wheat.
This involved grinding the same wheat multiple times. After each pass, the millstones were re-adjusted for a finer grind and then the fine flour would be extracted by bolting. Evans strongly influenced contemporary technology. Besides obtaining the U. Patent Office's third patent ever for his automated flourmill, in he authored The Young Millwright and Miller's Guide. The book became the millers' bible for the first half of the nineteenth century. Smart early-nineteenth-century homemakers bought flour, or had wheat milled into flour, as they needed it.
It didn't keep well. The presence of crushed wheat germ in un-refrigerated flour made it go rancid; excess moisture made it turn musty. And infestation by grain moths, rodents and other critters was always a risk. Housewives back then had to be conversant with all the agents of contamination in wheat and flour. These included the natural scourges that ruined quality as well as those that dishonest millers might deliberately introduce.
In her book, The Good Housekeeper , Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, an American domestic expert of her day, wrote, "Fresh ground flour makes the best and sweetest bread. If you live in the vicinity of a mill, never have more than one or two bushels ground into flour at a time. Hale recommended washing wheat first as a precaution, especially if any smut was present. This fungus disease turns the grain it infects into a dark mass of spores.
After washing wheat in multiple changes of water until the water ran off clean, the wheat had to be dried completely in the sun. As soon as trade between regions was established, flour was transformed into a commodity.
Except in the countryside, where the local gristmill still ground flour and meal from farmers' grain, most consumers relied on a product shipped from a distance to make their daily bread. As early as the s, Americans were concerned about processors slipping adulterants into their food for their own gain.
In France and England, flour adulteration had an illustrious history. To warn her readers to be on guard, Hale listed whiting, ground stones and bones, and plaster of Paris as substances added to flour in Europe "to swell its bulk and weight. Hale outlined several procedures to determine if the flour was free of these culprits. For instance, lemon juice or vinegar will cause flour that contains stone-dust or plaster of Paris to effervesce.
Another test Hale recommended was squeezing a handful of flour very tightly for a minute. Pure flour will keep the form you have given it when you open your fist. Even the grains and wrinkles from your skin will be visible.
If it contains foreign substances, it will crumble almost immediately. Some families preferred more healthful, whole-wheat flour, called Graham flour, after Sylvester Graham, the early nineteenth century evangelist for dietary reform. But even they might be sold an adulterated product, like bran cut with sawdust, with the more highly prized fine flour removed. Hale told homemakers that by supplying wheat to the mill, rather than buying already milled flour, they could avoid this rampant deception.
The pursuit of greater speed by the titans of industry ushered in the next stage in the degradation of flour. Around , stone mills began giving way to newer "roller milling" technology, which processed wheat into flour much faster than stone mills, even those that employed the largest, hardest millstones. It took several decades for this European invention to traverse the Atlantic and get established in the Twin Cities under the auspices of Pillsbury and Washburn.
Their huge, centralized factories depended on railroads to move vast quantities of flour around the country. Roller mills had the advantage of more neatly separating out the wheat kernel into its three components.
To produce a stable variety, multiple generations of self-pollination and careful selection of plants is required. This is the method the PBI utilised in , crossing the Canadian Red Fife with a low protein British variety to produce Yeoman, a hard wheat that measured in at around centimetres tall.
While this breeding improved the bread making properties of homegrown wheat, the UK was still importing much of its bread wheat — a trait that continued until the s when a trio of changes came into place. The first was the advent of the Chorleywood Bread Process , an industrialised process that could utilise lower protein wheats.
Since the s, breeders of milling wheat have been increasingly focused on their largest market — white sliced bread — meaning that the modern varieties such as Skyfall are bred for this purpose, producing high yields, of sufficient protein levels for roller milling and the Chorleywood Bread Process.
The pressure for high yielding wheats is also driven by the way the commodity market operates. These, in theory, are going to impact the yield. But there is a trade-off between resources being put into yield or traits which improve resilience: height improves weed competition, restricts fungal spread upwards through the plant, genetic diversity restricts susceptibility to particular strains of infection, and so on.
In addition, there has been an increase in demand for sourdough bread, as well as a rise in awareness about the health benefits of whole grains. But the modern wheat we grow in this country is suited to neither market. So, what grains should we be growing? How can we rebuild genetic diversity in our wheat? And can we re-localise our supply chains? Photograph: Brandon Giesbrecht. Is farming different from many other professions?
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