Can You Carbo-Load Your Way to Good Health?
A revolution is afoot in bakeries across the country. With highly processed flour giving way to freshly milled whole grains rich in nutrients as well as flavor, it might just be OK to love bread again
ENLARGE
The bread arrived by UPS, heavy as flesh, wrapped in brown paper. Its springy crust belied a two-day journey from baker Avery Ruzicka at Manresa Bread in Los Gatos, Calif.
If shipping bread cross country seems like a wanton act of locavore disobedience, consider that I’m not talking about just any loaf. The one Ms. Ruzicka sent me was made using Oregon-grown Edison wheat berries, ground to flour shortly before being mixed with water, naturally fermented for 24 hours, then baked to tangy, tender goodness. This bread is imbued with all the nutritional virtues of the wheat kernel—perhaps the most misunderstood ingredient in modern America. Forget juicing. Forget bone broth. With bread like this, many chefs and bakers have come to believe, you can carbo-load your way to optimal health.
Ask Adam Leonti, who, like Ms. Ruzicka, grinds his own flour for pasta, bread and pizza dough. Mr. Leonti shed 15 pounds eating sourdough breads made from wheat pulverized by the 10,000-pound stone mill at his Brooklyn Bread Lab.
“There’s fiber in there, which is missing from peoples’ diets altogether,” Mr. Leonti said. “You have all these enzymes that are alive and volatile, which are extracted from white flour to make it shelf stable. Those are the things your body is searching for to make digestion happen, to make nutrition happen.”
The farm-to-table revolution has transformed most of the restaurant pantry, but even sophisticated kitchens still largely craft baked goods and pastas from lily-white commodity flour, an ingredient short on flavor and nutrition. Thus, baguettes and bucatini have come to be understood in some quarters as deviations from a wholesome diet.
Recently, though, a growing number of bakeries and restaurants around the country have begun to grind their flour fresh, or work with local mills to do it. The practice boils down to more than effete notions of superior flavor or artisan virtue; this flour teems with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants freshly liberated from the wheat kernel—elements that have been largely absent from American baked goods for generations.
Chad Robertson, whose Tartine bakery in San Francisco sits at the epicenter of the artisan-bread movement, is in the midst of taking his milling in house. Last year Marco Canora installed a mill at Hearth in New York City, and he uses it to grind corn and wheat for polenta, pasta and pastries. At Union Restaurant in Pasadena, Calif., Bruce Kalman makes his pasta from durum and other wheats ground by a local miller, Grist & Toll. At Vetri Ristorante in Philadelphia, head baker Claire Kopp McWilliams now mills all the flour for their breads, pasta and pastries, from wheat procured directly from farmers. Add to their number Richard Bourdon at Berkshire Mountain Bakery in Western Massachusetts, David Bauer at Farm & Sparrow in North Carolina, Chris Bianco at Pizzeria Bianco in Arizona and Justin Slojkowski at Bruno Pizza in New York—committed millers, all.
To understand flour, you must know the wheat kernel, which comprises a fibrous outer layer, the bran; a starchy middle layer, the endosperm; and the vitamin-rich core, or germ. For most of human history all wheat was milled whole. White flour, a modern invention, is produced by grinding only the endosperm for shelf-stable starch that is later enriched with a handful of vitamins and minerals.
ENLARGE
Freshly milled flour is also worlds apart from the so-called “whole wheat” flours and baked goods on supermarket shelves. Typically, those are made by mixing white flour with a small amount of wheat bran but with the wheat germ omitted altogether because its oils limit shelf life. (For those playing along at home: Community Grains, Grist & Toll and Carolina Ground are three excellent online sources for whole-milled flour. The flour starts losing its flavor immediately after milling, and should be used within a week for best results. Store it in the freezer to preserve flavor and prevent it from turning rancid.)
This generation of whole-grain milling is still in its infancy, and nutritional data on freshly milled flour is scant, though it’s clear enough what highly processed flour is missing. “Wheat is incredibly nutritious, but when you mill in such a way that you remove the bran and germ, you’re losing the micronutrients that we need the most,” said Dr. David Killilea, a nutritional biochemist at the Children’s Hospital of Oakland Research Institute. “When you compare what’s removed from wheat to make commercial flour, it tracks pretty well with the nutrients that are most deficient in the U.S. population.” A long ferment—letting bread rise 24-48 hours—has the further beneficial effect of breaking down gluten, making it easier to digest.
“One huge difference I find is when you’re eating this type of whole food product, freshly milled and long-fermented, it fills you up,” said Mr. Robertson. “I eat bread every day, at a lot of meals, but I don’t eat a ton of it because I’m eating stuff that’s more whole-grain, and it’s satisfying, and you feel it in your body in a different way.”
For an increasing number of chefs and bakers, that difference makes it worth putting up with the challenges that attend fresh milling, which are many. Rick Easton, who closed his acclaimed Pittsburgh bakery, Bread & Salt, a few months ago, said he paid $1.40 per pound for a whole-milled product, while commodity flour runs around 20 cents a pound. “Most of my customers just wanted to know why the bread doesn’t cost $2 a loaf,” he said. Sourcing wheat from local farmers subjects bakers to the whims of their varying harvests, and flour milled this way lacks the consistency of industrial flour, making it more finicky to bake with. Despite all that, Mr. Easton hopes to re-open his bakery in New York City.
J.D. McLelland, whose forthcoming documentary “Ingrained” chronicles the rebuilding of regional grain economies, predicts that improvements in milling technology and more widespread cultivation of grains fit for whole milling will soon make high-quality flour more accessible and affordable. He likens wheat kernels to coffee beans: Grinding to order was rare 20 years ago, but now it’s expected. “The biggest element that could improve grain is treating it like a fresh product,” he said. “Aroma equals flavor, and flavor equals nutrition.”
![[http://m.wsj.net/video/20160522/052216poll2/052216poll2_167x94.jpg]](https://web-archive.nli.org.il/National_Library/20160521004321im_/http://m.wsj.net/video/20160522/052216poll2/052216poll2_167x94.jpg)
![[http://m.wsj.net/video/20160523/052316species1b/052316species1b_167x94.jpg]](https://web-archive.nli.org.il/National_Library/20160521004321im_/http://m.wsj.net/video/20160523/052316species1b/052316species1b_167x94.jpg)
![[http://m.wsj.net/video/20160519/051916scrabble2/051916scrabble2_167x94.jpg]](https://web-archive.nli.org.il/National_Library/20160521004321im_/http://m.wsj.net/video/20160519/051916scrabble2/051916scrabble2_167x94.jpg)
![[http://m.wsj.net/video/20160523/052316palmedor/052316palmedor_167x94.jpg]](https://web-archive.nli.org.il/National_Library/20160521004321im_/http://m.wsj.net/video/20160523/052316palmedor/052316palmedor_167x94.jpg)
![[http://m.wsj.net/video/20160520/052316seib/052316seib_167x94.jpg]](https://web-archive.nli.org.il/National_Library/20160521004321im_/http://m.wsj.net/video/20160520/052316seib/052316seib_167x94.jpg)
