Filed under: project updates, where the flour went | Tags: bread, Chicago, cornbread, flour, industrial harvest flour, muffins, noodles, report-back, waffles, whole wheat
Happy New Year! For all you flour recipients, thanks for all the notes in response to my recent email about what’s happened to all the flour y’all took home. It’s been fun reading them all. So far, the emails and reports have ranged from short essays to just a few words. As much as I love a long, leisurely tale (and there’ll be plenty of entries dedicated to those, don’t worry!), it’s those that say so much in so few words that I want to celebrate in this post. Because, if you still owe me a note, it’s as easy as these. Really. You can write a novel, and I’ll appreciate it, but these are also totally and wonderfully perfect in their simplicity.
From: K
To: sarah
Date: Tue, November 16, 2010 4:08:15 PM
Subject: Taylor’s muffins
Hi Sarah,
Taylor, my 10-year old daughter, and I met you at Forest Park’s market on Oct 8. We loved your flour and made apple muffins. We shared them with co-workers, teachers, friends and neighbors. They were almost all gone before I remembered to take a picture!
Hope your project is going well.muffins de Taylor
From: M
To: sarah
Date: Mon, September 27, 2010 9:02:28 PM
Subject: Photos of our wonderful bread : )
Hi Sarah,
Here are a few pictures of the delicious bread we baked this weekend. Thanks a lot for providing us with the
free flour and for all the wonderful work you do.wonderful bread
I’ve gotten two lovely notes from P. in the last week, both under 10 words with a single picture. Note that the plates are the same.
From: P
To: sarah
Date: Wed, December 29, 2010 6:50:30 PM
Subject: Waffle
Made with industrial harvest flour & enjoyed with friends. Delicious.waffling
From: P
To: sarah
Date: Sat, January 1, 2011 3:40:55 PM
Subject: Cornbread made with industrial harvest flour
Part of the traditional new year’s meal.happy new year!
From: S
To: sarah
Date: Tue, November 9, 2010 1:24:02 PM
Subject: What I did with my flour
Hello Sarah,
I used most of my flour to make waffles for my friends! I hosted a waffle breakfast and fed about 14 people, including moms and other guests from out of town. They were all delighted to participate in your project. Thanks for providing the delicious main ingredient!and more waffling!
From: k
To: sarah
Date: Thu, December 30, 2010 10:14:56 AM
Subject: Re: happy holidays from industrial harvest
Hi, Sarah, thanks again for the flour! I used some for homemade noodles.and a little noodlin'
From: j
To: sarah
Date: Thu, December 30, 2010 6:47:32 AM
Subject: Going to make oatmeal artisan bread to share
Sent from my Wireless Phonebread-to-be
From: c
To: sarah
Date: Mon, January 3, 2011 4:28:57 PM
Subject: chocolate chip muffins!
Unfortunately I did not think to take pictures and have used the whole darn bag but I made a lot of chocolate chip walnut
muffins for the holidays. Delicious and GONE!*
*this was a friend of mine, and it wasn’t till after she sent this email that I realized I had eaten some of those very muffins. They were indeed delicious.
Filed under: baking, project updates, where the flour went | Tags: baking, bread, Chicago, flour, InCUBATE, industrial harvest, industrial harvest flour, report-back, residency, wheat, whole wheat
Today’s snippets all come from the so-called blogosphere. I have been amazed at the profusion of cooking / eating / food-related blogs that exist, and tracked down quite a few posts that detail baking adventures with Industrial Harvest flour. Bonus: food bloggers, if I may generalize so crudely, appear to be quite dedicated. They take lots of pictures. They provide lots of loving background detail and backstories. They also often include recipes!
Some of these have made it to the Industrial Harvest facebook page already, so excuse the repeats if you’ve seen them already. But let that be a reminder to you: if you’re on facebook, said page is a great way to let me know what you’ve done with the flour. Another option: post photos to our still-underutilized flickr group!
Moving right along: this blogger made whole wheat biscotti using Alice Waters’ recipe
ECO, a cooperative household in Pilsen, runs a CSA and a co-op. They did all kinds of stuff with the flour and took wheat berries to plant a cover crop on their rooftop garden.
Last year around this time, I was wrapping up a residency at InCUBATE, which may have been the tipping point at which this project became a reality. InCUBATE (and I, as resident) shared their Congress Theater storefront with the Chicago Underground Library, and that was how I met Thuy. Thuy is a pretty serious baker, and turned me on to the magic of pure wheat gluten (if you’ve never tried it, it is a miracle cure for too-dense, heavy bread). So I knew Thuy would do something awesome with the flour and was thrilled to re-connect with her this fall. Her beautifully written post is not to be missed.
The Cuentos Foundation had a fundraiser / bake sale in October to raise money for Oaxaca mudslide victims at Danny’s, a classic Chicago watering hole.
My buddies Gina and Jerry in Seattle have been all wrapped up with opening what will surely be a super-delicious, authentic and unpretentious Italian restaurant. But they still took the time to adopt 50 pounds of flour and bake a huge batch of bread for the local food bank…in their backyard brick oven that they built themselves.
And then there’s this. Your mouth will water looking at these pictures (click “next post” all the way at the bottom of the page for the finished product).
Filed under: baking, recipes, where the flour went | Tags: 48th ward, apple cake recipe, Chicago, ernie constantino, flour, industrial harvest, wheat, whole wheat, whole wheat pastry flour
An addendum to yesterday’s post on Edgewater / Care For Real. Ernie Constantino, who hooked me up with Care For Real, Tom Robb and Mary Ann Smith, was introduced to me at least in part due to his excellence at pie baking. He lives in Edgewater, so he and his partner stopped by one chilly Saturday morning and took home 40 pounds of whole wheat pastry flour. Ernie has since become one of my most dedicated test bakers, sending me detailed reports on flour performance and recipes. Here’s Ernie’s recipe for apple cake. Happy Thanksgiving!
Ernie Constantino’s Apple Cake
Ernie’s report: “the cake was well-received in spite of my feeling it was way too sweet! … so if you forward this recipe, please give them my notes that the sugar could be reduced by at least 1/2 cup (btw, I used Turbinado/Raw sugar) and also the amount of batter was too much for a standard bundt tube pan …. also it was very moist which is good taste-wise but it crumbled easily esp. with the amount of apples called for in middle of cake … nutrition-wise, I think with the unpeeled hand-picked apples and WWPF*, canola oil, OJ, walnuts and eggs, it’s a winner!”
*whole wheat pastry flour. Ernie is not the first person to use this acronym, though I’ve avoided it.
This recipe is un-adjusted to reflect Ernie’s notes above. You can decide about the sugar yourself.
| instruction | ingredients |
| Chop and combine | 6 apples
1 Tbl cinnamon 5 Tbl sugar |
| Mix in large bowl | 2 ¾ cups whole wheat flour
1 Tbl baking powder 1 tsp salt |
| Whisk and mix with above | 1 cup vegetable oil
¼ cup orange juice 2 cups sugar 2 ½ tsp vanilla 1 cup chopped nuts |
| Add | 4 eggs |
Pour half of batter into greased tube pan. Spread half of apple mixture on batter. Pour remaining batter then remaining apples on top.
Bake in 350 degree oven for 90 minutes.
Filed under: baking | Tags: flatbread, mike glodo, pita, pizza, stovetop breads, summer, whole wheat
Yet another thing I did not really think about when I planned this whole adventure was that I’d be taking on a project that involves a great deal of baking in the summertime. We’ve had a few days of 90 degree heat already, and the mere thought of turning on a 450 degree oven on top of that makes me start sweating (well, we’re always sweating these days so nothing’s really different, and not that I’m complaining, but it still doesn’t really make for good cooking weather). Then last week, as if he’d heard my plight through the psychic friends network, Industrial Harvest fan Mike Glodo sent along an email with a few recipes for stovetop breadmaking. Three variations on non-yeasted, fast and easy flatbreads that require no oven time, just a hot griddle – which I pass along to you now, pretty much verbatim:
PIZZA / PITA / NOT PAPADUM BUT GOOD
Base Dough
About 1 cup all-purpose flour
Add 1/2 t kosher/pickling salt (no iodine)
Olive oil 2t to 1T
Water about 1T
Flour close by for your hands (this gets sticky)
Put flour and salt into wide flat bowl. Have big metal spoon handy.
Form a well in the middle.
Pour a little water and oil into the well.
Use spoon to gather in flour from outside well.
It clumps. Good. Mix it around a bit, add more water and oil, continue gathering until the dry ingredients are pretty much gone. Form into a ball, cover with plastic (I use a recycled tortilla wrapper, just rinse it off after use and it’s already food-grade). Stick it in the fridge for 20-30 mins (not essential, but improves texture)
Then: Take about 1T of dough, drop it into some flour (de-stickys it) and roll it into a ball. Roll out thin on a floured surface into ~4-5″ diameter disc.
PIZZA
For stove top pizza – plop into a moderately hot small cast iron (preferred) pan. Make sure all ingredients (garlic/cheese/sausage/whatever) all ready to go before you drop the disc. This moves fast. Flip over and add ingredients (dried basil, diced garlic, olive oil, parm, ricotta, f’r instance). Cover loosely with a pot lid to drive heat to surface (but you don’t want to steam it)
In the oven: Add topping, put the pan in oven and git ‘er done. Takes about 8 mins in oven.
Bake at 500 degrees or so; put disc into a warm cast iron pan (as above) but don’t flip and add ingredients to the surface.
PITAS
The difference here is that with the same dough, you’re going to roll it out *thicker* and put it onto a much hotter pan. This seals the bottom of the bread, and drives steam (usually!) and starts to bubble up the top. Once you see the top clearly start to separate in a couple of places, flip it.
NotPapadumButGood
Use the same dough, thin or thick or even thinner. Once dough is rolled out into the disc, sprinkle on red pepper flakes or garlic or dried basil or caraway seeds or fennel seeds or coarse black pepper. Mix and match is cool. Roll into surface of the dough, flip, roll in some more. These can be dry fried (remember, there’s some olive oil in the bread) or in a little butter or oil.
They are great with anything that looks like raita or tzadziki etc. Drain whole milk yoghurt, add some salt, cumin, lemon juice, mashed garlic, olive oil. Bash it about, let it rest in the fridge to tighten up. Great also for scooping up curried whatevers.
Main thing – the dough preparation takes maybe five minutes. Stick it in the fridge, and the cooking goes pretty fast after rolling them out. You can also iterate proportions of cake (pastry) flour. I jack up that in this same recipe to about 1/3 soft flour to 2/3 bread when I use almost the same recipe to make flour tortillas. Soft flour makes ’em a little more foldable.
I haven’t tried these exact formulas yet, but the same night I received Mike’s missive I was making up some pita dough using this recipe expressly for the purpose of stovetop flatbread, with the whole wheat pastry flour. We topped them with a fava bean / tomato / onion /olive oil mixture, pesto, some arugula and cheese here and there. Once I got the skillet temperature worked out, they were absolutely delicious. The pastry flour did make them deliciously soft and pliable and not too tough / chewy/grainy tasting, despite using 100% whole wheat flour. With Mike’s recipe we could have saved ourselves a bunch of time by not worrying about the yeast or rising the dough, so take his advice if you want to have more time for summer things and less time and fuss in the kitchen. Enjoy!
Filed under: baking, project updates | Tags: all-purpose flour, greenfield mills, industrial harvest, milling, new rinkel flour, pastry flour, wheat, whole wheat
Another crucial link in the long chain of transactions that hold this project together has now officially been forged (actually, this happened awhile ago, it’s just taken me awhile to post): the miller.
It took awhile to find a miller, and was much more difficult than I’d expected (although, to be honest, nothing in this project has been easy, I’d erroneously assumed that after figuring out Board of Trade delivery logistics, I’d be home free). Dealing with 1000 bushels of non-organic wheat posed problems to millers both large and small. The big guys couldn’t keep “my” lot of grain separate from the rest. Since this project is all about creating an identity for a generic commodity, once it comes out of the grain elevator, it needs to evolve into something more “special” – and I mean, I just can’t go putting my very special commodity grain in with all that other riffraff. The small mills were typically either exclusively organic and/or too small to handle that quantity of wheat in a reasonable time frame. And, you guessed it, there just aren’t a lot of small mills out there anymore. Smaller grain mills used to be common in the country midwest, but most of them have gone out of business.
So finding the folks at Greenfield Mills was a lucky break. A fifth generation family operated mill on the Indiana / Michigan border, it’s also hydro-powered (generating power for the mill, plus 11 nearby homes). Small enough clear out a bin to keep my grain separate, big enough to not be exclusively organic, and run by some very kind, understanding and accomodating people. Dave Rinkel, who I suppose you could call the patriarch of Greenfield Mills, has been walking me through the miling process with plain talk and good humor.
They’ll be milling two types of Industrial Harvest flour (and as much as I detest terms like “branding”, well, I’d just like to acknowledge that creating this “brand” has been a very satisfying part of this process): a whole wheat pastry flour, and an all-purpose unbleached white flour. Here are the labels that will go on the bags of flour. Bonus points for folks who can identify the origins of the label symbology…
All purpose Industrial Harvest flour label
Industrial Harvest Whole Wheat Pastry Flour Label
This project has been a little bit like starting several businesses at once; I’ve been continually polling the bakers I talk to: what kind of flour should I make? Because soft red winter wheat – the type traded on the Chicago Board of Trade and commonly grown in the lower midwest – Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri – is lower in protein, it’s better suited to pastry flour. Although I’m not opposed to pastry flour, it’s used more for baked goods (cookies, crackers), biscuits and pie crusts – all delicious food items, but it’s not quite as versatile as I’d like – and I really wanted folks to be able to make bread with this flour. After further discussion with Dave Rinkel, I decided that it would be worth mixing in a bit of hard wheat to bump up the protein content of the soft wheat and get an all-purpose flour. This will make it better for breads, which need that protein to develop that great chewy texture. At this point, I get a little bit less uptight about letting other wheat mingle with my special batch; in life, practical considerations create inconsistencies that we must live with, and more than anything else I want this flour to be a useful product for the people that receive it.
We had our friend T in town for a night this past week. His presence at our dinner table was a good excuse to get back on the baking. I turned to an old standby, pita bread. Homemade pita – with a pocket and everything – is so much better that store bought pita does not make it on my shopping list anymore. Pita is also less time-consuming than loaves, and pretty easy for dilletante bakers such as myself to get great results.
Here’s my recipe:
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 1/4 cups flour (I used 1/3 white flour, 2/3 whole wheat flour from Fairhaven Mills co-op)
1 tsp salt
1 cup warm water
1 tablespoon sugar (I usually don’t add the sugar, but supposedly it makes them brown more quickly and gives more food to the yeast)
2 1/2 teaspoons (1 packet) yeast
I primed the yeast by putting it in the water, adding just 1 cup of flour, and letting that sit about 30 minutes till it was bubbly on top and puffy. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix it up and give it a quick knead and let it rise for about 45 minutes. Then divide the dough into 4 equal parts and form it into balls. Let the dough balls rise for about 10 more minutes, then press them into 8-inch rounds about 1/4 inch thick. Bake on the bottom rack of a 450 deg. oven for 5 minutes; you definitely don’t want to overdo it. The pitas will puff up while baking (if you’ve got kids, the puffing will be quite a treat to watch), taking on their signature “pocket” form, and may get slightly brown when they’re done, but don’t wait for them to get brown before you pull them out of the oven – you want them to stay pliable.
The whole wheat dough made for a pita that had more flavor, but was grainier and not quite as decadently divine as the standard white flour pita. I kind of forgot that with whole wheat you need more water / less flour which probably would have improved the results. They were still better than store-bought, especially when piled with homemade babaghanoush and falafel and veggies. We never made it out of the kitchen, preferring to stand and nosh and catch up as other friends dropped in to say hi to T.
In the middle east, pitas are made in 800-degree brick ovens like pizza (in fact, pizza itself, and the word pizza may have evolved from pita, which basically means bread or flatbread in several languages). The very high temperatures are what cause the puffing. The yeast goes into shock somehow and aids in the puffing, along with steam. In searching online after the fact (here for a whole wheat pita recipe and check out the comments here for lots of useful tips), higher oven temperatures – 500 degrees – and a bit of misting in the oven with a spray bottle are recommended to encourage puffiness.
Filed under: baking | Tags: blender, bran, bread, Chicago, cracked wheat, deconstruction, InCUBATE, milling, no-knead bread, observation, organic flour, recipe, whole wheat
This project requires understanding every link in the cycle of growing, refining and making all sorts of things with wheat. Now that I’m feeling a little more comfortable with the baking, I can take things up a notch – what about actually making the flour? Back in Seattle, I ground some of the wheat up in a coffee grinder just to see how that would work. It took a long time and almost burned out the motor, but I did end up with something flour-like. I thought I might be able to find someone who had a home-use flour mill in Chicago and try it, but it turns out I’ve been a little busy trying to find things like commodities traders and farmers and cannot even bring myself to think about running around this huge city trying to track down a flour mill. Somewhere, somehow I heard something about using a blender to do the job. And InCUBATE happens to have a really nice heavy-duty blender. So this is what happens when you put wheat in a blender and make some bread with it.
It took 5 or 6 rounds of running the blender, sifting out the flour, and putting the rest back in the blender till I was good and sick of the noise, and there were still a bunch of cracked wheat berries left over.
-
- Blender Flour
-
- Milled Flour
Here’s the side by side comparison. The blender flour (left) was more uniform in size and texture, while with the milled flour it’s quite easy to differentiate the flour (made up of the endosperm, the starchy interior part of the wheat) from the bran (its brown, papery exterior). The texture of the blended flour was also coarser – comparable to hruba mouka, the coarse-ground flour used by the Czechs to make bread and dumplings.
I decided to repeat the bomb-proof no-knead recipe from the other day, and used 1 cup of milled whole grain flour, 1 cup of fine whole wheat flour (the whole grain flour sifted) and 1 up of the blender flour. To that I added a healthy dose of pure wheat gluten that a friend gave me. Made from the protein part of the wheat, pure (or vital) wheat gluten added to bread is supposed to help it rise – another trick home bakers use to get bakery-quality results, especially for whole wheat breads.
At the end of the milling, sifting and measuring stage, here’s what was on the counter. The photo deliberately misrepresents my organization / neatness level.
Wheat, Deconstructed
From left to right in the bowls, we have the sifted and unsifted milled flour, the blended flour, and the cracked wheat. The cracked wheat won’t go into the bread but can be made into some sort of porridge (ugh) or as a substitute for couscous or bulgur in a pilaf (not so bad), or even into bulgur wheat itself, which sounds delicious but labor-intensive. In the center we have the gluten on the left and the bran on the right. The excess bran is used to keep the dough from sticking and to put a little crunchy crisp on the top, but there will still be some leftover. I’ve been using it in shakes for breakfast and gave the rest to the person who gave me the gluten.
The result: delicious! I was a little bit amazed at how quickly this bread baking stuff has become somewhat routine. The motions, the textures and the timing are already starting to feel more intuitive. No doubt my learning curve has been flattened (steepened? anyway, it’s getting easier) due to the advice of many friends and visitors (pros and hobbyists) to the InCUBATE ‘test kitchen.’ The all-powerful internet helps too, but the internet can’t stand in the kitchen with me and tell me “that’s a good crumb” or “those little strands are what you’re looking for” or “it’s probably time for it to go in the oven now.” These people are teaching me what to look for and how to observe the process, and it’s making this project a whole lot more satisfying and delicious.
As a postscript, I thought of Heike a lot making this latest loaf and this post – read her observations, and her observations about observation here (I liked them so much I put them on my other blog). She’s also the proud owner of a new flour mill!
Filed under: baking | Tags: bread, Chicago, InCUBATE, jim lahey, no-knead bread, organic flour, recipe, sullivan st. bakery, whole wheat
A huge shout out to Bryce, InCUBATE co-founder, who suggested this revolutionary recipe for bread. You make a really wet dough, let it rise for 12-18 hours and cook it in a covered pot. Every single person I talked to who had tried this method affirmed that it’s amazing – what, a recipe with no letdown??
This method was developed by Jim Lahey at Sullivan St. Bakery in NYC. The science geek in me was drawn to his ability to work with the science behind bread baking to put the home baker on equal (well, better) footing with the pros. The home baker is at a real disadvantage in terms of equipment when it comes to producing a bakery-quality loaf, and Lahey’s approach requires no baking stones or steam injected ovens, just your standard ingredients and a pot with a lid.
I made an organic whole wheat dough with organic flour – 2/3 whole grain and 1/3 sifted so that it was more of an all purpose flour. The dough did not seem as wet as it should have been at first – probably b/c of the whole wheat flour – so I added a little extra water. I also ended up putting it in the fridge overnight after the first rise and then taking it out again in the morning; it’s probably better to start this one at night rather than first thing in the AM. The dough made charming little fizzy musical notes as it rose, was perfectly cooperative and the final result was good looking AND delicious. I’m eating it now!
Bryce was also kind enough to lend me his camera so that I can take a few better-then-cell-phone quality pictures; appropriately enough the first pictures are of this picturesque loaf of bread.
-
- in the pot
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- the finished loaf
-
- crisp crust, chewy interior
Filed under: baking | Tags: Anne Elizabeth Moore, bread, Chicago, InCUBATE, organic flour, potluck, recipe, residency, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whole wheat
This past weekend, Anne and I spent our afternoons trekking around the city visiting different farmers’ markets. At the cute little downtown farmstand I picked up some locally grown organic flour from Ackerman farms in Chenoa, Illinois – located about 100 miles away, they also grow organic edamame soybeans, corn and other produce. I also scored some cinnamon-infused honey from another market the following day. The honey whole wheat bread featured on the Fresh Loaf therefore seemed to be the logical, easy and delicious choice. Measured by weight, my ingredients would make a bread that is over 75% local and organic.
I tried to be a little more anal with this recipe, but there was still some improvisation required. The recipe calls for some a mix of whole wheat and all-purpose flour, which is made by sifting the bran out of the whole grain flour. There is no sifter at InCUBATE, and I had to pick up window screen from the hardware store across the street to make an improvised version which totally did the trick. The little kitchen scale at InCUBATE made it possible to actually follow the baking tips on the Fresh Loaf website, which strongly advocate measuring by weight as opposed to volume.
Whole wheat dough needs to be more moist in order to get a good rise, but I had no idea what the difference was between a “sticky” (not good) and a “tacky” (good) dough. I thought tacky was bad (smoking / eating while walking, loud gum chewing, handbags that don’t match).
Speaking of tacky, the dough rose in the bathroom right next to the heating vent – the warmest available spot. The delicious smell was the best air freshener ever, permeating the bathroom and then the entire space. The second rise got cut short due to time constraints, as I was taking the bread up to Mess Hall for Anne’s final Art Institute class presentations. My loaf was therefore a little small and the crust a little thick, but tasty – especially paired with butter that we made ourselves; the act of doing so was part of one of the presentations. The class was about creative resistance of corporate culture, and was, appropriately, a potluck (and damn, those kids can cook!).
As a footnote, a new acquaintance who is a baker from Floriole bakery (conveniently, their kitchen is located almost right next door to InCUBATE) told me that “tacky” means that there is no spackle-like dough coming off on your hands when you handle it. Now we all know. She also said it’s tough to screw up whole wheat bread – “it always tastes good.” Music to my ears.
Industrial Harvest 