In Winter's Kitchen. Beth Dooley
fend for themselves naturally fascinate me. Why not celebrate what God has provided us?”
Several years ago, Matt, then in his late twenties, moved to Durango, Colorado, seeking mountains, sun, crisp air, and fresh snow. After going to college on the East Coast, our oldest son had traveled through Europe and worked in Boston. But whenever he came back to Minneapolis, he’d proclaim his love for this place, biking along the Mississippi, canoeing in the Boundary Waters, and camping on Lake Superior’s shores. He’s found some of those pleasures, and more, in Colorado: he has planted a garden, has found love, likes his work teaching high school, and volunteers as a medic and firefighter.
The other day, Matt called, requesting a family recipe for gingersnaps. When my father was diagnosed with lung disease, he’d brighten and proclaim, “You are the best medicine,” every time I made the trip east to visit. In the afternoon hours when he napped, my mother and I, not wanting to leave the house, baked gingersnaps to keep busy, fill the house with the smells of ginger and spice, and temporarily reconnect with Minnesota.
In researching a magazine story about Christmas cookies, I interviewed Hilda Kringstad, a Norwegian immigrant living in Minneapolis, whose pepperkaker were always the first to sell out in the local church bake sale. “I always grind my own cardamom and nutmeg,” she said. “I learned to bake with my mother and grandmother, and though they spoke an older dialect which I didn’t understand, there was for me an air of mystery and excitement in this work that included me, and that I could immediately comprehend.”
The question of commercial viability is the biggest argument corporations use to discredit the work on heritage grains by plant researchers, medical doctors, and small, independent organic farmers. Corporate farmers are heavily invested in the equipment required to grow vast crops of short, productive commercial wheat. Is it unrealistic to expect them to change their practices overnight to plant more sustainable, healthier crops?
“Yes,” argues Dr. Don Wyse, a plant geneticist at the University of Minnesota. “The responsibility of a land-grant institution is to address the key issues of our time. We should be working to solve the environmental crisis caused by conventional farming practices,” he told me when we met for coffee near the U of M’s research plots on the St. Paul campus.
“If we really expect conventional farmers to grow food that does not destroy the planet and that is good for us on a large scale, we have to provide them with a profitable alternative to these unhealthy and environmentally damaging crops,” he continued. “Farmers are running a business. They are concerned with profit and loss; they need to make a living.” The afternoon we met, Wyse was easy to spot—he entered the shop carrying a round, squat loaf of dark bread. It was warm and freshly baked with flour he’d ground from the wheat grown in the U’s trial plot. The slice he cut for me was dense, chewy, a bit dry, but very flavorful. Wyse’s long gray hair was pulled back from his receding forehead into a tight ponytail and his broad shoulders stretched his neoprene U of M training shirt. He spends his days in the test plots or hiking through the world’s most remote regions, seeking wild plants that might become sustainable crops.
“We must put our intellectual and financial resources into figuring ways to grow real food on a commercial scale,” he said. For the past twenty-five years, Wyse has been working with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, to develop perennial commercial crops of wheat, sunflowers, and flax. He calls the initiative “High-Efficiency Agriculture.” Once planted, these crops will return naturally year after year. “Wheat is a grass, after all, and grass is perennial,” Wyse reminded me. These crops do not require tilling and planting, the major causes of soil erosion. They grow prolifically without doses of harmful chemicals. “Perennial wheat is a sustainable crop,” Wyse said. “Its root system becomes more robust through the years so that it can withstand floods and drought. These plants hold a lot of promise as real food, animal fodder, and biofuel.”
Is the flour from heritage and perennial wheat significantly better than that from commercial wheat, which at first seems far easier to plant, grow, harvest, and mill? Are the efficiencies created by our industrial system worth what it will take to change them? What is the price of plant diversity and food security; what is the price of our health? Most important, what is the price of flavor?
I sought an answer from Jeff Ford, founder of Cress Spring Bakery in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, near Madison. Ford has been profiled in the New York Times for his award-winning breads, made from the heritage grains he buys from neighboring farmers and grinds himself—einkorn, emmer and Turkey red. They are leavened naturally, not with industrial yeast, and baked in an enormous wood-burning oven built by the legendary mason Alan Scott.
Cress Spring is located off narrow County Road F, which winds through the piney hills in south central Wisconsin. It’s not easy to find. The location eluded Google Maps, and after several wrong turns, I pulled into the long and bumpy driveway, scattering geese and chickens away from the car and drawing out a few curious piglets that trotted to the edge of their pen. As I stepped out of my car, I was hit full on with the glorious, toasty, slightly sour scent of freshly baked bread.
I pushed open the door to a sunlit room lined with wire shelves of wicker baskets cuddling rising dough. On others, rows of dark oblong loaves and fat raisin-studded rolls, just out of the oven, were cooling.
Ford is tall and slender. His wispy gray curls, secured with a ponytail, were sprung around a yellow bandanna. Wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Serene and soft-spoken, he got his professional start in a Madison bakery as an accountant and then left nearly thirty-five years ago to build Cress Spring on communal farmland, constructing his bakery around the wall-sized oven. Wendell Berry-inspired and Rumi-quoting, Ford chops his own wood for the oven and buys all the ingredients for his breads and pastries from his neighbors and fellow farmer’s-market vendors.
Twice a week, on baking days, Ford grinds the grains to maximize nutrition and ensure freshness. The natural fermentation method he uses to create the starter that leavens the loaves makes them especially easy to digest. In comparison to yeasted dough that puffs up quickly and flavorlessly, Ford’s bread requires nearly twenty-four hours for its slow rise. The process imparts a sweet, complex acidity and changes the grain to make its nutrients more accessible to our bodies. Because the bread is made of such simple ingredients, it tends to last longer, too. The kamut-raisin and mixed-grain loaves I brought back to Minneapolis stayed fresh in a brown paper bag for about a week. Ford said that plastic traps in moisture and turns the bread moldy. “Bread needs to breathe,” he said.
Many of Cress Spring’s most devout customers come with wheat allergies and have found they can digest the kamut, spelt, and rye breads. Ford agrees with Jaradat and others that America’s wheat issues start on the farm. “The varieties of wheat are bred by industrial production to stand up to machines are all monoculture, chemicalized, and lack any nutritional value,” he said. “We feed people this stuff that their bodies are not designed or adapted to eat. Of course they’re sensitive to it, and it’s not good for them and causes problems.”
Over the years, Ford has intentionally reduced Cress Spring’s business to a more manageable scale, dropping wholesale sales to make more profitable home deliveries in his muddy blue truck. At the Madison Farmers’ Market, he always sells out of four hundred loaves. “Saturdays at the market, people tell me they love what we do and hand me money all day. At this point, it’s not work; it’s my social life,” he quips. Sure, these whole-grain, organic, locally sourced, naturally fermented, and gluten-sensitive loaves are nutritious, environmentally responsible, and supportive of the local economy. But the reason they sell out each week? Spring Cress loaves are burnished gold, their edges slightly burned; they are wheaten and fragrant, tooth tugging and tender, indescribably good.
Turkey