Sources for whole grains

Try smaller health food stores. Quite often they get things without paying for shipping from their suppliers. And they are more willing to special order than a larger health food store.

The down side is that they are more focused on "organic" and "healthy" than "good bread". You might have trouble getting a good grain from them. Ask to see their catalog. You may also run into strange minimum orders. Its worth mentioning that whole grains can last for centuries in storage, so there is no real reason not to order larger quantities.

You might wind up being disappointed in the white wheat. Despite the current craze for it, it's quite bland and doesn't really handle as well as a red wheat.

Good luck, Mike

You might find that your local store carries a particular brand but is purchasing through a distributer.

If the distributer does not carry the product desired the store will not be able to get it.

On 2005-08-25, Mike Avery wrote: [...]

I've got a call in to a local co-op along those lines, but I have yet to hear anything back.

How can I determine what wheat is good for baking without just trying it? I know that I should generally aim for spring instead of winter, and of course hard instead of soft wheat, but aside from that, I have nothing to go on. The bag of red wheat berries I just bought from the Whole Foods bulk bin has some bits of grass and unidentifiable dark-colored particles I'm going to have to pick out of it, so I'm none too impressed with that source. (Or should I expect that even from the best suppliers?)

I've calculated that I ought to be able to get through 50 lbs. in a year, so yes, I am willing to do large orders. I'm a little hesitant to do a large order from a supplier I haven't tried yet. It seems like 25 lbs. is a pretty standard minimum bulk order; as long as I don't have to pay shipping, I'm pretty happy to order that much.

I've been baking with white wheat flour (King Arthur brand) for a while, and I quite like it. I usually blend it with red wheat in various ratios, though (most commonly 50/50), because it is a little bland on its own, as you say. When I make pizza dough, though, I find that 100% white whole wheat is much better, because I don't like a very strongly-flavored pizza crust. Of course, my hope is that freshly-ground red wheat will have less of the undesirable flavors and more of the good flavors (as compared to pre-ground red wheat flour), but perhaps my hopes are too high.

Speaking of the white wheat craze, I just heard a story on NPR today about how large commercial bakers (such as WonderBread) are starting to latch on to it. I assume they see it as a way to recapture some of the market they lost to the low-carb diet craze. I did notice a very light-colored "100% whole grain" Sara Lee loaf in the supermarket the other day. Of course, what they don't advertise is that those loaves are also so full of sugar that the benefit of the fiber from the whole grains is pretty much negated, at least from a carbohydrate perspective.

I'm not looking to pick a fight, but I beg to differ. All my bread books indicate that spring wheat has the highest quality protein in terms of gluten strength, and most bread flours I've seen that bother to specify are spring wheat, whereas winter wheat is more often found in all-purpose flour. I have seen sources that say that winter wheat is more nutritious and flavorful (though these sources never give details on exactly what the nutritional differences are), and so some bakers prefer winter wheat. (Some bakers looking for a European-style flour would also probably prefer it for its weaker gluten.) And studies show that 4 out of 5 Birkenstock-wearing health nuts (no offense) who sprout their own wheatgrass also prefer winter wheat.

A Google search turns up a few sites which support the idea that spring wheat has better gluten quality than winter:

I got a Family Grain Mill (the version that mounts on a KitchenAid), which is a slow-turning steel burr grinder. It gets good reviews

I think all the current research (and my wife is currently in a PhD program in nutritional epidemiology, so by proxy I have some minimal authority on the subject) indicates that the net effect of whole grains in the diet, when they replace refined grains, is only positive, no matter what phytates and their kin might do in a petri dish. And if you do a long, slow fermentation (especially sourdough), you'll get quite an improvement in digestability, although I don't know if this has been studied extensively outside of petri dishes. (And if there's one thing I've absorbed from listening to my wife, it's that in vitro experiments can be rather unrepresentative of what actually happens in the human body.)

But whether it makes better bread or not is pretty subjective -- it depends on what characteristics you look for in good bread. It is true that if volume and "fluffiness" are to be maximized, bran only gets in the way. If you want subtlety in the flavor (or if for some unspeakable reason you want your bread to be flavorless), bran is your enemy (though white wheat is helpful in this regard). If you want a denser (but not necessarily brick-like), moist bread with a hearty flavor, well then 100% whole grain is the only way to go. Personally, I like lots of different kinds of bread and I crave variety, and so I occassionally make bread partially or entirely with refined flour. (Though I always add wheat germ in its natural proportions when using refined flour.)

If you have a Whole Foods close by, that might be your best bet for bulk grains. And they usually have the organic form for most of them...

irax.