The return to wholemeal flour: A challenge for artisan bakeries
Wholemeal is not the trend of recent years! The pros have long since proven that you can cook and bake almost anything with whole grains, although the road from vision to perfect result is a winding one. The "curves" are the appropriate grain variety and milling method as well as dusting off experiences that disappeared with the advent of white flour. Craft is thus meeting the challenges of the present day.
Some bakers are acting uncompromisingly, pulling wholemeal pastries out of the oven, from bread to croissants. Tomáš Solák of Praktika is considered a pioneer on the Czech gastro scene, having introduced whole wheat and stone-ground flour as the pillar of his concept. However, for many bakers (and thus also millers!) it is still a distant goal or a negligible addition to the shelf.
A quid pro quo!
"With wholemeal, we're going back to nature and what's natural to us," points out Karolína Kunftová, who specialises in holistic natural medicine called naturopathy. "Our society is nutritionally malnourished because food has lost nutritional density, and contains fewer nutrients relative to its energy value. At the same time, I feel like we've displaced the fact that food primarily provides the material to run and regenerate our bodies, and we've looked to it for mere satisfaction. It takes a small step back."
The reason why whole grains began to have their husks and coatings removed was for stability and longer shelf life, but also the quicker preparation of the cereal, the attractive white colour of the flour, the finer texture and the plumpness of the baked goods, which are, after all, easier to make from light milled flour than from wholemeal flour. This, however, causes cereal products to lack the valuable elements and characteristic flavours of the grain.
While the inner part of the grain, the endosperm, largely contains proteins and starches, in the outer shell of the grain, the bran and the aleurone layers, are vitamins (mainly B-complex, A, E), minerals (calcium, manganese, iron, zinc, magnesium), enzymes, phenolic compounds (with antioxidant effects), and also insoluble and soluble fibre, which is the main source of food for our intestinal microbiome.
"The outer layers of the grain are a great multivitamin and multimineral as opposed to the starch kernel, which is not as nutritionally important," confirms Karolina. "Whole grains and whole grain foods packed with fibre are ideal food for gut bacteria and a thriving microbiome, but also stabilise blood sugar and slow down glycaemia, which is both physiologically and energetically beneficial for humans."
It probably won't surprise you that eating whole grains (preferably in organic form, which eliminates the buildup of residues in grains) helps reduce the risk of certain cancers, heart disease and diabetes. The above mentioned enzymes and oils in bran and germ also add a specific flavour and aroma to the grain, and affect the way flour and dough work.
Messages from Berlin
"Because of industrialisation, we have come to believe that white flour has the best baking properties and is therefore suitable for baking. Now we are finally discovering that we were wrong. Flour is not just a substance - it's a complete raw material and we need to look at the origin and quality," says Olga Graf of Berlin Kornlabor project, which connects farmers, millers and bakeries, educates about flour and awakens discussion not only among professionals.
The people from the UM Education Centre at the National University of Technology have also joined in, teaming up with Olga as well as bakers Florian Domberger and Björn Wiesein their research on flour. Both are working with wholemeal flour, but most importantly they are narrowing down the collaboration with farmers and millers, thus shortening the supply chain, increasing the quality of the grain milled not only in their own operations, but also encouraging the development of artisanal baking.
"Bakers and confectioners have become accustomed to stabilised flour, forgetting that their craft is to work with flour that is alive and unstandardised. They have abdicated their responsibility for the health of their customers," says Olga, who sees wholemeal as a necessary response to today's situation. "We can't afford to throw away 30% of grain. That's roughly what is left after grinding conventional white flour."
A similar idea runs through the U Kalendů bakery."It makes sense to me to use raw materials as much as possible without any residue, and this also applies to grain. We tried to mix whole wheat flour into the dough for sweet bakes but we haven't managed to get that right yet. Soon, I am going to test the flours at UM and tweak the recipes so that one day we will bake all baked goods with wholemeal flour," plans chef and baker Sláva Grigoryk. U Kalendů's bread already contains 40% wholemeal spelt, red wheat and rye from the Dubecko Mill.
Inspiration from Turin
"If we want to bake with old grain varieties and wholemeal flour, we have to look to the past and realise that baked goods used to look different than they do today. We can't change our approach, build on tradition and expect the same result from the dough as with milled white wheat," recalled Andrea Perino, a baker from Turin, where the Ambiente artisans flew to for further insights.
Over two days, they toured several businesses. In addition to Andrea and his operation Perino Vesco they visited baker Luca Scarcella or the Sesto Gusto pizzeria from Massimiliano Prete, timeless concepts where tradition meets the needs of today's society through different doughs, be it wholemeal flour, the potential of native cereals and direct contact with farmers, or climate change and the so-called population wheat (more on that next time).
"We have to adapt to nature, not nature to us," Andrea said, an idea echoed by all those mentioned, including the mill Molino Agostiniwhere his bakery gets its flour, but also, for example, Café Savoy - Italian single-grain flour in organic quality complements the Czech flour from Dubecko in the recipe for baguettes.
The main objective, however, was an excursion to Bongiovanni millfrom which the flour for Pasta Fresca and Pizza Nuova. In Celetna alone, they process around 400 kilos of pasta flour a week and care not only about quality but also about who and what they support with their purchases. The workshop at the mill (and in the bakery lab) focused on whole grains and stone-ground flour which retains those important parts of the grain, the active germ and a higher proportion of bran. This must then be taken into account when working out the dough.
"Stone-ground wholemeal flour requires autolysisto help kick-start the enzymatic processes and create a resilient dough. When the flour is mixed with water and left to rest for half an hour, it hydrates the bran, which would otherwise take moisture from the dough during maturing and only harm it,' he advised baker and technologist Luca Zucchini. Bran therefore allows higher hydration of the dough, which gives it a deliciously moist crumb and better digestibility, thanks to the activation of enzymes.
To reinforce the wholemeal dough, after autolysis, two more types of wheat flour are added to the mix, the lighter Type 1 and the "semi-wholemeal" Type 2 with a higher germ and bran content, which are ground to a finer granulation between the stones than on the rollers. T2 flour thus suits, for example, pasta.
Time for a change
At Bongiovanni, flours ground on the stone are referred to as Antiqua. They come from grain harvested within 50 km of the mill and include several types of flour of different strengths (W). Bread made from cereal flour supplemented with wholemeal rye, sesame and flax seeds, oat and barley flakes, corn flour and buckwheat, and there was talk of a multicereal special for pizza makers, who dare to let go of the conventional wisdom about pizza dough.
During the training session, they also baked Roman pizza from Core flour, adding bran and roasted sprouts to the grain ground on the roller. The latter is not as active, but it adds at least some nutrients, taste, fat and softness to the bread. Millers are thus trying to defend the advantages of roller mills while at the same time looking for ways to improve the (nutritional and baking) quality of the final flour in the bag.
"Grain is the basis of our diet and we should be concerned about how flour is produced and what difference does it make when it's ground on a stone or on a roller. It has revolutionised our diet," shared the view of Antonio Carlini, a chef and baker who has worked with the Bongiovanni mill for several years and accompanied the Ambi team on a trip through his native Turin.
"I'm not saying that we all have to bake with wholemeal flour, but for me it's an added value that enriches our products. As bakers and foodies we can change the paradigm of how ingredients are grown and processed and offer people really good and healthy food," urges Antoni, who is in the same boat as the Ambiente pros, and is helping to steer the joint voyage to better flour.
Source: Kornlabor, Molino Bongiovanni, Probio, Karolína Kunftová Naturopatie
