Here’s a story from the Washington Post published a few days ago: On baking bread with perennial grains, those are grains that don’t need to be reseeded each year. They include wheats! Hence, bread!
Long-ferment breads
The story talks about recipes for fighting climate change. How so? Because perennial grain is harvested each year, without needing a completely new set of energy-intensive inputs to do it. As author Sarah Kaplan says, “Buying seeds, fertilizer and equipment can put farmers in the red before a single grain is harvested …”. Of course, one needs to keep an eye on how many nutrients are being removed from the soil each year, nutrients in-nutrients-out is a balance that should be maintained, but farmers have found a way to do it—tastefully.
As I write in FoodWISE, “One of many programs pushing back is that of Stephen Jones of Washington State University. Jones is a wheat breeder and director of the well-known Bread Lab, itself a think tank and baking laboratory for scientists, farmers, chefs, brewers, and others who want both flavor and nutrition, as well as functionality, from their grains. Stephen Jones and his team are committed to plant breeding specifically for local food systems, and this includes small grains and dry beans”—both of which can become flour, and all of which can become bread. See, “Going with the Grain,” Washington State University Bread Lab, http://thebreadlab.wsu.edu/going-with-the-grain, and FoodWISE.
See vlog, here.
