In the third part of his series on alternative approaches to cooking and food, Haydn Shaughnessy looks at grains.
My loaf, my life. Wheat is the stuff of it. We know instinctively the significance of bread to our diets. Though we all err and occasionally snack on baps and rolls made from processed flour, it is the artisan loaf that is truly on the rise (excuse that pun).
For anybody who believes we are remorselessly traditional in our approach to food, get this. A few years ago, the English speaking world was dominated by white or brown bread: sliced or unsliced, medium, thick or thin, wrapped or unwrapped, and of course soda bread.
Look at any retailer's bread shelf: French baguettes, Italian focaccia and ciabbata, Greek pitta, Indian naan (plain, with garlic or with coriander), rye bread, organic bread, bread with nuts, seed, bread with olives, tomatoes, tortillas. That is variety.
There is not so much to be content about though.
When retailers such as the main supermarket chains sell bread unwrapped they do not have to reveal the ingredients. And many of those that do have ingredient lists should be ashamed. Hydrogenated vegetable oil, soy flour (used because it's cheaper than wheat), preservatives.
The truth is we don't know how much of this junk ends up in many of the freshly baked loaves on the retailers' shelves either.
Being a mug for a croissant on a Sunday morning, I won't be too holy in the matter of grains but the constant struggle to read the small print on loaves in the supermarket, and our distrust of unlabelled products, is what set my wife Roos and I off on our own bread-making adventure.
That and a little known fact: talking to your partner in the late evening can lengthen your life. It's just a tip from an old woman who swore that washing the dishes with her husband, and having a gossip while they dried the coffee mugs, is what got her to 105 (she doesn't say what age he was when the great dough-maker in the sky came calling).
In our house we ruminate at night while rinsing the odd jar of sprouted broccoli seeds, and when the choice of dough starter is up for debate.
We have also home flakers and millers. Our house is a bit like a Kellogg's Cornflake factory slimmed down to domestic proportions, and a flour mill made for the kitchen worktop.
We are becoming self-sufficient in transforming grain into food. Why?
We don't know who to trust in the bread market. We have little trust in cereal makers, although we ultimately depend on them, even with our own home production line.
The few bread products we have sourced that might pass our quality test are too expensive. And we think we can improve on them with our own domestic production unit.
We have been the owners of a home cereal-flaker now for about two months, and recently we started using our first home flour mill.
Flakers are simple machines. Working on the same principle as the old fashioned washing mangle, they flatten grains and turn them into flakes, ready to eat. From grain to a box of breakfast cereal in about 30 seconds.
We're slightly less experienced with the home mill, it's a flour mill that uses stone grinding, just like you get in stone ground whole meal flour, a technique that preserves most of the wheat's goodness.
In both cases, using both the mill and flaker, I know precisely what I am eating. There is not a shadow of doubt. I don't need to trust the reputation of a company unknown to me.
Apart from knowledge, which counts high on my list of priorities, I also get a better product. Better because it is healthier.
In the case of flaking (you can use flaked oats in porridge, or eat it with yoghurt or include it in muesli) I am retaining the natural and essential fatty acids that grains contain, but which are usually eliminated by commercial processes and by time.
Natural oils deplete quickly and are unlikely to be present in flakes that have spent weeks in transit and on shelves.
Commercially milled flour creates too much heat to retain those oils. Stone ground flour is, of course, second best to home milling, but even stone ground flour could have sat on a shelf for weeks.
My flakes, and of late my flour, have been sitting around for about two minutes maximum.
An added bonus is I can fool those among the kids who won't willingly eat brown bread. By grinding wheat finely and adding in white flour they think they're eating a white loaf and they object less to taking on board a healthier sandwich.
Healthier food, under our control, gives us greater flexibility to eliminate ingredients we don't want to eat. But more than that, flake your own oats and you can smell oats, you can taste oat and you can sense the completely different texture of a grain freshly cracked.
Before anybody is tempted to say: yeah, but a bit cranky milling your own flour and flaking your own oats, think first what you might have said about artisan bread a decade ago.
Artisan breads when produced and baked honestly are of course a good product. My suspicions centre more on who can be trusted and who not.
Next week: Juicing and drinking
www.thedietcast.com
- Put home mills into Google and what you get back is Blarney Woollen Mills. Home mills are a German obsession and are difficult to source, though far from impossible. Flakers are available in health food stores - at the very least a health food store should be able to source one. Home mills are imported to my knowledge only by Mary Wedel in Bandon, though she would gladly hand over import to a qualified wholesaler. She can be contacted on tel: 023 52985.