Why ‘chaos wheat’ may be the future of bread (Michael J. Coren, September 17, 2024, Washinton Post)

Of the 47 million acres of wheat planted across the United States, experts I interviewed said very few have been planted with varieties like those produced by the Breadlab. “I tried to change the commodity system,” admits Jones, who served as director of the Breadlab until earlier this year. “You just can’t.”

So he turned to smaller farmers looking for ways of growing grain, and premium brands that could turn the flour into higher-priced products, as an alternative that’s “replicable, rather than scalable.” While more labor intensive — sometimes it requires years to fine-tune wheat blends for specific environments — a growing number are embracing the approach as part of the regenerative agriculture movement seeking to improve soil health and cut carbon emissions.

King Arthur Baking Company, the employee-owned company that released its Climate Blend Flour last year, is probably the most well known. The blend of wheat varieties, including a perennial capable of growing for years rather than being replanted every season, is part of King Arthur’s push to source 100 percent of its flour from “regeneratively grown wheat” by 2030. The result, says King Arthur, is a rich, nutty flour that can work in any whole-wheat recipe (something I confirmed in my own muffins).

The scale so far is tiny (just 120 acres), and prices are higher: A one-pound bag of Climate Blend Flour sells for $2.98, compared with $1.12 for standard whole wheat. But the company says it hopes to drive down costs as it assesses the climate benefits. “We believe in this work and understand it needs to be a long-term commitment,” Janis Abbingsole, the chief operating officer at King Arthur Baking Company, wrote in an email. “We need to allow time to listen to our growers and support them as they test and learn.”

We’re required to take a few baking classes and in the Education Center they refer to all my bakes as a function of chaos. (Proudly displayed the heaviest cup of flour ever measured, until they explained that’s not the point…)

GOOD EATS:

Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor (Valerie Stivers, July 9, 2024, Paris Review)

The owner of the Sanford House restaurant, Mary Jo Thompson, wrote a cookbook in 2008 including some of the restaurant’s most beloved recipes. The book is out of print, but a curator from the Andalusia Farm museum sent me the restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie. To my modern eye, the recipe looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy, which I thought would be wishy-washy to the eye and the palate.

I decided to make one version of the pie following Thompson’s recipe, and then also to generate my own blown-out recipe using from-scratch techniques and amped-up retro flavorings. Chiffon pie research online, however, turned up wildly different formulas. The “chiffon” designation is supposed to mean a pie with an airy texture that has been created by mixing a custard base with whipped egg whites. But the most common contemporary recipe I ran across asked for packaged vanilla Jello pudding mixed with Cool Whip. The flavor and color came from food coloring and peppermint extract. It technically wasn’t “chiffon,” and it relied even more on ingredients from packages and cans than the Sanford House version. Eventually I made up my own recipe, making a crust from crushed Oreos, a filling from homemade custard mixed with whipped egg whites and flavored with peppermint extract, and a whipped cream topping mixed with crushed peppermint bark and peppermint candy. I would achieve a pink color with a particularly powerful neon-pink gel food coloring.

The comparison project was slightly hampered by the lack of Keebler Ready Crusts in any of the grocery stores I have access to, so I ended up making Oreo crusts for both the Sanford House pie and my own. Fortunately, having a strict comparison didn’t matter in the end. I didn’t need two recipes because you can’t make a bad peppermint chiffon pie. The Sanford House version was mild, minty, and just sweet enough. Topped with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate syrup, it was heavenly.

THE LAST AMERICAN HEROES:

It’s Time to Give Moonshine Some Respect: It’s an American tradition and as worthy a liquid as any unaged spirit (CAROLINE EUBANKS, June 26, 2024, Inside Hook)

“We just don’t have a better word, so moonshine has come to fill that void, and it’s problematic because moonshine can also mean an illegally-made spirit,” Spoelman says. “Then that suggests a dangerous or poorly made spirit, perhaps to some ears.”

The legacy of moonshine also counteracts many of the stereotypes. “A good moonshiner would try to give his customer a good value,” Schumaker says. “If you sell somebody 180-proof moonshine, it’s really not moonshine, it’s almost vodka at that point. There’s a misconception that that’s the only thing that a moonshiner would sell.” Unfortunately, the majority of the recognizable brands on the market don’t create anything that could truly be identified as moonshine, instead offering neon-hued flavored drinks made from neutral grain spirits in mason jars.

Moonshine is actually a uniquely American product with roots back to the earliest days of the nation. The Scots-Irish settling in the mountainous east coast are primarily responsible for bringing their centuries-old distilling traditions stateside, using corn and water straight from the source to carefully craft flavor. Kings County sources corn from upstate New York, and Highlands gets its materials locally in southwest Virginia and Pennsylvania, allowing for the spirit to pick up the terroir.

“It’s very challenging to make a white spirit palatable, and that’s the job of the moonshine maker, whereas the whisky maker can fudge that piece of the process and sort of age out the imperfections over time,” Spoelman says.

So why doesn’t the industry appropriately recognize it? Moonshine typically falls under the category of “other American whiskies” in the awards, and very few have broken through to claim the medals like Troy and Sons in Asheville, North Carolina, which has twice been honored for its platinum whiskey.

Moonshines of this variety also rarely appear on cocktail menus outside of the territory where the spirit is traditionally distilled in Appalachia. But it has as much versatility as anything else you might have behind the bar.

“The cocktail opportunity of an unaged whiskey remains pretty unexplored, especially when you have tequila, silver tequila, white rum and various kinds of apple spirit ending up in cocktails,” Spoelman says. “I still think moonshine is maybe at the trough of its backlash, and it’s poised for a re-emergence as a more cultural mainstay once it’s better understood.”

One of my buddies is a moonshiner and I bring him any grains, sugars, fruit products we are getting rid of. Constantly amazed at the quality of the liquor he can turn them into. There’s even a reality show about them nowadays.

“THE MOST HEAVENLY TASTE”:

Make the Ancient Road Snack of Central Asian Nomads: Qurt is salty, long-lasting, and packed with protein. (SUSIE ARMITAGE, MARCH 8, 2021, Atlas Obscura)

ONE WINTER MORNING, PRISONERS AT the Akmola Labor Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, part of the Soviet gulag system from the 1930s to 1950s, trudged to a nearby lake. As they began gathering reeds to heat their frigid barracks, children and elders from the neighboring community approached the shore. The kids hurled small, hard white balls toward the women, and the camp guards cackled: Their charges weren’t hated only in Moscow, but here in remote Kazakhstan as well, recalled Gertrude Platais, who had been arrested in 1938 and sent to serve her sentence there.

While it initially seemed like an insult, the villagers had the opposite intent. One of the prisoners tripped on the projectiles, got a whiff of milk, and suspected they were edible. Back in the barracks, Kazakh prisoners explained that it was qurt, a traditional dried dairy product that had sustained nomads across Central Asia for centuries. Long-lasting, easy to carry, and packed with protein and calcium, the balls—described as “precious stones” in a poem about the incident by Raisa Golubeva—provided a much-needed supplement to the sparse prison rations.

LUBE JOB:

For Enslaved Cooks, Persimmon Beer Combined Ingenuity and Joy: A conversation with Michael Twitty about the powerful history behind a centuries-old beverage. (DIANA HUBBELL, NOVEMBER 12, 2021, Atlas Obscura)

MICHAEL TWITTY, THE JAMES BEARD Award–winning culinary historian, estimates he has brewed his grandmother’s persimmon beer about a dozen times. Made by fermenting Diospyros virginiana, the diminutive North American persimmon, with sugar, honey, and yeast, persimmon beer is more akin to fruit wine or liqueur than anything brewed with barley, malt, and hops. Twitty continues to make his family recipe for its sweet-tart flavor and striking amber hue imbued by red pine straw. More than anything, though, he continues the tradition of fermenting this gently boozy elixir because of its deep ties to Black American history and its power to start conversations.

In his book The Cooking Gene, Twitty describes the experience of sharing a batch with contemporary Civil War reenactors. “Persimmon beer became my social lubricant of choice, even with a whole troop of Confederate soldiers,” he writes. Twitty notes that it was likely the very same drink with which his ancestors would have toasted their freedom in 1865.

For generations of Black families across the American South in the 18th and 19th centuries, persimmon beer played an integral role in daily life. In his quest to uncover more about the foodways of his ancestors, Twitty learned that American persimmon trees are a genetic echo of fruit trees in West Africa, and that both the plant and the beverage provide a thread across the history and geography of the African diaspora.

With ’simmon season currently in full swing, Gastro Obscura spoke to Twitty about his family history, the importance and evolution of foraging, and how much a single recipe can reveal.