breakfast of champions

One of the intermediate achievements to come out of a four-decade experiment of The Land Institute’s founders Wes and Dana Jackson was trialled earlier this week before a body of scientists, conservationists and environmental activists in the form of a cereal milled from the grain of a perennial wheat, domesticated through a series of cross-breeding (see also) to make a potentially useful food crop out of wild prairie grasses.
Calling their cultivar Kernza, the team hopes to transform and invert the way industrial agriculture affects the environment and ecosystem as an enduring part of an environment that admits cohabitation rather than a seasonal interloper that requires energy intensive replanting year after year and causes a large degree of collateral damage despite its otherwise shallow impact.  In comparison, seasonal farming practises seem like a scorched earth campaign, with pesticides, erosion, vast expanses of monoculture that does not allow for a degree of diversity and the act of tilling itself that releases a bigger share of carbon dioxide than most other human enterprises.  Learn more at the links above.

kenyér varázslat

Our thanks to always bewitching Art of Darkness for revealing to us a common trope through Hungarian folklore in the apotropaic magic of bread. To ward off impending evil, tradition dictates that one simply place a loaf of bread in a windowsill and allow the bread to speak for itself:

First they buried me under the ground, and I survived. When I sprouted and thrived they cruelly cut me down with by sickle, yet I survived. They threshed me with the flails and I survived. They ground me to flower with their millstone yet I survived. They kneaded me in a bowl, and then they put me in a hot over to bake me and I have survived. Have you done all these things? Until you live through all these things, you have no power here.

Though this stems from the same superstitions that cause one to fret over vampire pumpkins (which would seem to kind of cancel things out), I do like imagining some twee croissant standing up to maleficent forces demanding admission into one’s house and being roundly rebuffed.

bran and chaff

The fact that the genetic code of rice and maize were mapped in 2002 and 2009 respectively and the wheat genome is just now being puzzled out is not a comment on the staple crop’s importance—both culturally and agriculturally, but rather testament to advances in computational power pitted against an incredibly complex blue-print that is magnitudes larger than human DNA (three billion base pairs as opposed to sixteen billion in a cell of wheat) and is composed of six copies of each chromosome (hexaploid) compared to diploid humans (XY, XX).
One wonders how much fourteen-thousand years of farming contributed to that complicated pedigree and how much was driven by natural forces.  Equipped with this more complete picture and an understanding behind the mechanism and orientation of how certain traits are expressed, after careful research and deliberation (the worst trade-offs are the ones we don’t see coming) scientists hope to be able to select for adaptable cultivars that can withstand a hotter, drier climate or varieties that don’t require pesticides or fertiliser, like this indigenous Mexican corn that can fix its own nitrogen from the air. Other applications could yield wheat-based products that are more nutritious and palatable for people with intolerance to it.

it's toasted

The eponymous reaction was named for French chemist and pharmacist Louis Camille Maillard with the later collaboration of US Department of Agriculture fellow John Edward Hodge who described and established the chemical mechanism for it is the most common spell of kitchen-witchery, which we were heretofore quite in the dark about until being intrigued by TYWKIWDBI.

It endows baked, seared and roasted foods with their distinctive aromas and flavours. The process that leads to the production of hundreds of different and nuanced flavour compounds is the interaction of amino acids and sugars catalysed by reaching a target temperature—typically 140 to 180 degrees Celsius—flirting with the threshold of burning. French fries, stir-fry, malted beverages, Lucky Strikes, bagels, toast, roasted coffee and chocolate are some of the foods and drinks that owe their savour to the Maillard reaction.

far, far away

Properly that little world of one’s own, the Universe of any given fantastic saga is called a paracosm. Though first minted during a study into imaginary friends that some adults felt were lingering too long into the socially formative years when school began conducted in the mid-1970s, the word has since come to embrace all connotations—the spectrum from shy and retreating to those with the gift for engineering civilisations apart that are at the same time archetypal and immensely creative.

soup-and-sandwich syndicate

For a few years, we’ve had one of those sandwich-makers to take camping with us, but having received a “panini-press” for the holidays, we’ve aspired to create some soup and sandwich combinations for indoors as well. Lately, we tried Cheese and Leek soup with egg and cheese toasts.

For the soup, ingredients for four bowls call for:

• Salt, pepper, parsley, bay-leaves nutmeg for seasoning
• 100 millilitre (about half a cup) of dry white wine
• Six slices of wheat bread for toasting and for the croutons 
• A heaping tablespoon of flour
• Butter
• 100 gram (4 oz) container of heavy crème 
• 1 litre (4 cups) vegetable stock from bullion 
• Around 600 grams (about a pound) of leeks, washed, peeled and cut into thin rings 

For the toast:

• Bread and butter from above
• 2 eggs 
• Sliced cheese (Gouda or Gruyère) 
• Spinach leaves or lamb’s lettuce (Feldsalat) 

There’s no cheese left out of the cheese soup, of course, but that’s where it gets a bit tricky. In German markets, there’s Schmelzkäse that’s made for soup and I suppose it’s like the pasteurized processed cheese food that’s available in the States, but looks some much less estranged from natural cheese and is much more appetising. In any case, use about 500 grams of your local-equivalent. In the soup pot, braise the rings of leek in butter for three minutes, dusting the leek with the flour afterwards. Introduce the white wine, vegetable stock with the bay leaves and allow it to cook on low heat for another ten minutes or so. Remove the bay leaves and breaking the cheese product of choice into small cubes, add that and the heavy crème to the pot and allow to cook for an additional ten minutes, stirring often and making sure that the cheese is melting. In the meantime, cut two slices of the bread into little cubes and braise them in butter in a separate pan (you can save the pan for the eggs) for about three minutes until crisp and set aside on a paper-napkin to dry. Prepare two eggs sunny-side-up and in your sandwich-maker/pie-iron/panini-press, make the toasts with the egg, cheese slice and leafy green filling—sort of like a croque-monsieur. Season the soup with nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste and garnish with croutons and parsley.

tonic and toil

Archaeologists and ethnographers trying to reconstruct the inaccessible past (though there are plenty of cultural references to curse and toil—like in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden) have questioned why humanity moved from a hunter-gatherer society to agriculture and division of labour and have puzzled over this apparently rash decision, as a sustenance way of life is far less taxing and obligates far less of an individual’s free-time to earn one’s daily bread, as it were.
Giving into such incursions—alienation from labour that’s unfolded down intractable paths as civilisation, does seem to be quite a harsh punishment and we’re given to wonder for what award. Such advance is certainly not something to be taken for granted in the march of progress—other models are possible and farming and herding can be as capricious as scrounging for nuts and berries and game. One does not see other primates rushing towards cultivation—and not just despoiled wheat and grapes, and deferring one’s harvest to some unknown date. Some think, however, that the compulsion and motivation, perhaps the toxic knowledge, lie in fermentation. Humans would have never entered into such a social-contract without the accidental discovery of beer and wine (succour, according to other traditions)—or however one might name the libation. This does seem like a rather thunderous, not to invoke later protestations after that support structure was already well-established, revelation that can’t be unseen like the knowledge of Good and Evil, Drunk and Sober, and demarcating that free time sacrificed. That’s a little bit of magic, with primacy over bread, manna and other crops, that could elevate one from dull cares for a little while at least, even if that comes at a very high cost with equally high returns.

brototyp, archetype

I spied this corner bakery the other day with the clever yet not immediate (to my mind at least) tag line of “Brotagonist,” meaning like with
a protagonist, bread is the focal-point of this little Brotzeit (afternoon snack) narrative. The anti-hero or underdog in me did not go for the obvious pun, however, and I wondered why a bakery would want to antigonise its customers, perhaps with the villainy of gluten.

bread and circuses

From Mother Jones magazine, comes a fascinating profile of an academic research facility in Washington state and the bakers who are striving to reverse the trend in production that have made bread instead of what has been regarded “as the staff of life,” symbolically and historically, into “the spirit of disease.”
There are legitimate cases of course of celiac disease of individuals who cannot tolerate gluten, but impatience in the industry—white bread and some seemingly whole wheat cognates (fortunately, for now, this is not a problem in Germany, though I understand there is an increasing amount of baked goods prepared in China and elsewhere that employ the same short-cuts) does not allow the yeast to fully digest the gluten and the preservatives added and has a knock-on effect up the food-chain and may yield false-positives, in addition to such dietary fads that revile processing but not necessarily the process. In the facility's experimental kitchen, bakers are returning to traditional methods, yielding a far superior and better tasting product.

brototyp or bakers’ dozen

In Germany, there are over six-hundred distinct varieties of bread and some additional twelve-hundred permutations of baking besides. Not including beer-brews, which Germany might be more renowned for and enjoy actually a legal status that classifies and protects them as a liquid bread, these hundreds of different recipes and preparations are governed, unsurprisingly and meticulously, by a system of standards that codify traditional variations on a theme.

This process is illustrated in development of Brötchen—buns, rolls, which go by many regional names, including Weckeln, Weggla, Stollen, Kipfle, Bömmeln, Semmeln, and Schrippen with further distinctions for topping, what kind of seeds or grains they are encrusted with, and how the dough is rolled out and baked, -laibchen (round, like a little loaf), -stangl (like a staff that can also be twisted in a pretzel) or -hörnchen, with a shape like a croissant. Each type has specific percentages of what kind of grains comprise the dough, usually a given ratio of two or more different wheats and barleys. Small bakeries keep the lesser known and uncommon varieties on offer and local interpretation and nomenclature alive. I wonder if anyone has managed to catalogue ever type of Brötchen in circulation and unraveled the etymology. We don’t visit the baker’s like we ought to but I am resolving to do so more often and see what sort of heritage breads—and their unusual names (I am not sure if it’s just marketing or what, but one bakery offers what’s called “Sündlicher Weck”—sinful rolls, as near as I can guess), that I can discover.