Even Hostess, the company that, until its recent bankruptcy, manufactured Wonder Bread, has responded to the public’s demand for more wholesome and nutritious bread. It developed exotic new formulations that contained not just added vitamins and minerals and fiber, but quantities of the actual foodstuff itself: whole-grain flour. Well, actually, in most cases they were offering something more like the aura of whole grain, which is not quite the same thing. For example, they sold a “Smart White” bread offering “the fiber of 100% whole wheat,” said fiber derived not from wheat or any other cereal grain but from cottonseed, cellulose (aka trees), and soybeans. (The wheat itself was actually white flour.) Then they offered a “Whole Grain White” that you had to get really close to to read the small-print prefix “made with”; it turned out the first ingredient here was still white flour. These products strike me as borderline fraudulent. But Wonder Bread did then come up with one real whole-wheat bread that sounds like a breakthrough in modern food science: “Soft 100% Whole Wheat.”
Whole-wheat Wonder Bread! This has all the makings of a happy ending, in which the human quest for softer, sweeter, whiter, and airier bread is married to the nutritional benefits of whole grain. But things are seldom that simple in the food industry. The White Flour Industrial Complex is not about to go quietly into the dark-bread night. How could it, when its mills have been expressly designed to produce the whitest possible flour, splitting off the germ and embryo at the first break? When milling white flour and selling off the nutrients is more profitable than selling flour whole? To leave the germ in the flour would literally gum up the works, I was told by an experienced miller by the name of Joe Vanderliet. This is why it is always removed at the beginning of the milling process, even when making “whole” wheat flour.
“The engineering and the nutrition are pulling in opposite directions,” Vanderliet explained. Most commercial whole-wheat flour is actually white flour to which the bran and germ have been added back in. Whether such reconstituted flour is as good, or good for you, as flour from wheat milled whole on a stone is questionable, but the industry can’t do it any other way.
Adapting the reductive logic of industrial bread baking to the complexities of whole grain can’t be easy. What do you do about the volatility of the germ? Vanderliet claims that many large mills, including ones he used to work for, simply leave the germ out of their “whole-grain” flour “because it’s just too much trouble”—a serious charge, but a difficult one to prove. (So here we are again, not quite certain what is really in a sack of flour.) And what to do about the bitterness of the bran in modern wheat varieties? (Most commercial whole-grain breads cover it up with sweeteners.) Or the difficulty of leavening whole-grain dough with commercial yeast? This last problem was (literally) the downfall of a great many hippie loaves; without a sourdough culture to promote gluten development, 100-percent whole-grain breads tend to rise lethargically and crumble in the toaster. Yet it is hard to imagine the bakers at Hostess taking on the care and feeding of a temperamental culture of unidentified wild bacteria and yeast.
By now I was curious to find out exactly how Wonder Bread solved the riddle of baking a whole-wheat white bread. Was it actually possible to modify the logic of an industrial system based on white flour to produce a genuine and appealing whole-grain loaf? So before the company went belly-up I put in a call to the Texas headquarters of Hostess Brands, managed to get through to the public-affairs office, and asked the young man who answered the phone if I might visit one of their factories to learn how whole-wheat Wonder Bread was made. It was his first day on the job, but he promised to get back to me. I was pleasantly surprised when, a week later, I received an e-mail informing me that a visit to the Hostess bakery in Sacramento had been approved. When I studied the map, I saw that the Hostess plant was only an hour or so south of Dave Miller’s bakery—the artisanal whole-grain baker for whom Chad Robertson had worked—so I decided I would pay a visit to his bakery after my tour at the Hostess plant. Dave Miller mills his own grain and bakes 400, 100 percent whole-grain loaves a week for sale at the farmers’ market. The Hostess plant produced up to 155,000 loaves a day for sale at supermarkets across the western United States. It promised to be a day of extremes.
The Hostess plant occupies a sprawling, one-story industrial building on the outskirts of Sacramento. The smell of bread hits you in the parking lot, pleasant at first, but soon oddly cloying. Before the plant manager escorted me onto the factory floor, he handed me earplugs to muffle the din. A single waist-high production line snakes through the dim, cavernous space, vaguely reminiscent of a wildly ambitious model train set, with loaves of bread in metal pans taking the place of train cars. The line traveled all the way from the silos that store flour out back to the mixing drums, through the dough cutters and shapers, into the proofing chamber, beneath the scoring machine (where a thin jet of water neatly scores each loaf), into the tunnel-like oven, then onto the slicing and bagging machine, and finally the twist-tie-er, which puts exactly four twists into every tie. The same line can produce Classic Wonder Bread, or Made with Whole Grain White or Soft 100% Whole Wheat as well as Nature’s Pride, a new line of “all-natural”—i.e., no chemical additives—whole-grain and -grainish breads, in roughly the same amount of time: four hours, from flour dump to cooled, sliced, packaged, and twist-tied loaf.
The genius of the food scientists at Hostess has been to alter the ingredient formulas (type of flour, amount of yeast, source of fiber) without otherwise disturbing a mechanized system designed to bake white bread quickly. From the point of view of the bakers running the line, bread is pretty much bread, whether white, whole grain, whole grainish, no-high-fructose-corn-syrup, ton-o’-fiber, or whatever the currently compelling health claim dictates. Though the bakers did complain, cheerfully, about the challenge of getting air into breads that had to contain so much added fiber and minerals—“raising all that garbage,” one called it. Many of the company’s “healthier” brands are fortified with calcium, a mineral not ordinarily associated with wheat, but these days a compelling health claim.
“You’re basically breaking up rock and throwing it in your dough,” the head baker explained. He was talking about the challenge of adding prodigious amounts of calcium to bread, and his candor was disarming. “It takes a helluva lot of yeast to lift all that rock.” That’s when it clicked that the cloying odor—now upgraded to slightly nauseating—was the smell of yeast, lots and lots of it.
Having by now spent time in bakeries, and done a fair amount of baking at home, I was struck by how similar and yet at once how very different the industrial version of bread baking is. I watched flour and water being mixed into the familiar cement-colored slurry—and yet what are all those other ingredients getting added to the mix? The fifty-pound bags labeled simply “dough conditioner”? The ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides? The four types of sugar (high-fructose corn syrup, molasses, barley-malt extract, and corn syrup solids)? The wheat gluten and ammonium chloride and calcium propionate and sodium stearoyl lactylate and “yeast nutrients”? And why would yeasts living in such sweet dough need more nutrients, anyway? To balance their sugary diet?
The bakers in charge couldn’t tell me the function of the thirty-one ingredients listed on a package of Soft 100% Whole Wheat; they suggested I ask the food scientists at headquarters. But HQ wouldn’t let me to talk to their food scientists, ostensibly for fear they would inadvertently disclose proprietary baking secrets. Eventually I was able to ascertain from other food scientists the specific functions of the thirty-one ingredients, most of which fell into one or more of these categories: to back up a health claim; to “condition” the dough so it doesn’t stick to and thereby slow
the machines; to get as much air into the dough as rapidly as possible; to give the bread the cottony texture and moist cakey crumb consumers expect from the Wonder brand; to protect the bread from staling or molding; and, last but far from least, to sweeten the bread and thereby cover up the bitterness of bran and, even more important, the chemical taste of all the other additives.
Once upon a time not so long ago, most of those chemical additives would have been deemed “adulterants” by the Food and Drug Administration. But after an all-out campaign of lobbying by the baking industry in the 1950s, the FDA liberalized its “standard of identity” for bread, permitting bakeries to add dozens of new additives to what had previously been a simple two- or three-ingredient food. Earlier in the twentieth century, a group of experts convened by the International Congress for the Suppression of Fraud (quaint idea!) proposed a legal definition of bread that the loaves I was watching being baked would not have met. “The word bread, without any qualifier, is exclusively reserved for the product resulting from cooking dough made with a mixture of wheat flour, sourdough culture or yeast (made from beer or grain), drinking water, and salt.” How far this thing called bread has come!
And yet even after all these novel ingredients have been mixed into the dough, the process still sort of resembles the baking of bread. At one point early in the tour I stepped into the sponge room, where big hoppers filled with wet dough are bubbling and rising like sofa cushions as they undergo bulk fermentation. The only difference from a bulk fermentation in my kitchen or at Tartine is how quickly it happens here. By putting vast quantities of yeast to work—as much as 10 percent by weight—Hostess can get the great big belch of CO2 needed to raise a whole-grain or super-high-fiber dough in just an hour or two.
Indeed, much of the innovation in industrial baking has gone into speeding up what has traditionally and perhaps necessarily been a slow process. But time is money. So the dough is inoculated with legions of fast-acting yeast to speed its rise; it then gets one set of conditioners so it can withstand rapid handling by machines, and another to speed up (or replace) gluten development, and then it is heavily sweetened, so that even a 100 percent whole-grain loaf will deliver that quick hit of sugar on the tongue the consumer has come to expect from white bread. In the end, what has been removed from industrial bread by the addition of so many chemical additives is the ingredient of time.
Yet there are problems with speeding up whole-grain bread, and they begin with the flour. Many if not most of the new whole-grain white breads on the market are made with a new variety of hard white wheat developed by ConAgra. This is why the bread doesn’t look like whole wheat: the specks of bran are white, or whitish. They are also microscopic: The wheat is milled by ConAgra using a patented process called Ultrafine that attains a degree of fineness never before achieved in a whole-grain flour. This resulting flour, called Ultragrain, makes for a softer, whiter whole-grain bread, but at a price. It is metabolized almost as fast as white flour, obviating one of the most important health advantages of whole grains: that our bodies absorb and metabolize them slowly, and so avoid the insulin spikes that typically accompany refined carbohydrates. A common measure of the speed by which a food raises glucose levels in the blood (and therefore insulin, an important risk factor for many chronic diseases) is the glycemic index. The glycemic index of a whole-grain Wonder Bread (around 71) is essentially the same as that of Classic Wonder-bread (73). (By comparison, the glycemic index of whole-grain bread made with stone-ground flour is only 52.) So perhaps we really have gotten too smart for our own good.
Using commercial yeast to leaven whole-grain flour so rapidly may present another problem for our health. All whole grains contain phytic acid, which locks up minerals not only in the bread but, if you eat enough of it, in the body of the bread eater as well. One of the advantages of a long sourdough fermentation, as we’ve seen, is that it breaks down the phytic acid, freeing up those minerals. It also makes the gluten proteins more digestible and slows the body’s absorption of starch. That’s why a sourdough white bread actually has a lower glycemic index than a commercially yeasted whole-grain bread.
There is a second paradox here: Wonder Bread would seem to be a much more highly processed product than the bread I bake at home, with its dozens of additional ingredients and high-speed production methods. And yet, since the wheat in it never undergoes a true fermentation, Wonder Bread is in some respects less processed—less completely cooked—than the bread I bake at home. At least when it comes to processing wheat, sometimes less is more and more turns out to be less.
At the conclusion of my tour the Hostess bakers gave me a few loaves, and on the drive up to Dave Miller’s I sampled three types of neo–Wonder Bread. The Soft 100% Whole Wheat smelled strongly of yeast and molasses and was a shade darker than the white–as–Wonder Bread “Made with Whole Grain” loaf. The two loaves tasted equally sweet, which is to say very, and though the 100 percent whole wheat was not quite as cottony soft, I’m not sure I could have told them apart with my eyes closed. (Since I was driving, I decided to postpone that particular test.) My least favorite loaf was the Smart White, the one with the fiber equivalent of (but not the actual fiber from) 100 percent whole wheat. After an initial impression of sweetness, I registered several distinctly off flavors, probably from the cottonseed, wood pulp, and other nonwheat fibers and the minerals added to it—all the fibrous and rocky “garbage” that Hostess had baked into it.
After a while, all the neo–Wonder Breads began to seem the same, and less like bread than nutrient delivery systems. Yet it isn’t at all clear that such a reductive approach to nutrition—in which wheat seeds are broken down into their component parts and then reassembled along with other processed plant parts, some minerals, an additive or two derived from petroleum, and a ton of yeast to loft the whole deal—actually yields a healthy or even a healthier loaf of bread. These breads were really nutritional conceits, clever ways to work the words “whole grain” or “whole wheat” onto a package, now that those magic words constitute an implied health claim. But the idea of whole grain in these products clearly counted for more than the reality, which Hostess treated as something to overcome, disguise, or merely allude to. These were notional breads, and eventually they turned to cotton in my mouth. I was reminded of Richard Bourdon’s saliva test for good bread: Did a wad of it make your mouth water? These three flunked.
I had heard from Chad that Dave Miller had once owned a bakery called Wunder Brot, so when I showed up at the door to his bakery—basically a suite of rooms attached to his house, which was tucked into a lovely remote hillside in the Sierra Foothills, south and east of Chico—I presented him with a couple of loaves of late-model Wonder Bread. He looked slightly horrified, but managed a smile. A slender man in his late forties with a trim goatee, Dave was dressed in a crisp white pocket T-shirt and clogs. I wondered if this was the first plastic-bagged loaf of sliced bread ever to cross his threshold.
Miller’s Bake House is a one-man show. It was a Thursday, and Dave was grinding wheat and mixing dough for his weekly bake the next morning. He kept one eye on the mill, a stone wheel encased in a handsomely crafted wooden cabinet made in Austria, and the other on his Artofex mixer, an old-timey, pink-painted contraption from Switzerland. A pair of steel arms moved lazily up and down through the bowl of wet flour, convincingly simulating the action of human hands kneading dough.
Dave Miller is an uncompromising baker, as fiercely devoted to whole grains and wet doughs and natural leavens as Richard Bourdon. (If not more so: Only one of his breads contains any white flour.) But compared with his voluble, flamboyant mentor, Miller comes across as very much the Protestant baker, spare with his prono
uncements and something of an ascetic. Though he used to own bakeries and manage employees (including Chad Robertson), for the past seven years he has stripped his vocation down to its Thoreauvian essentials: one man, some sacks of wheat, a couple of machines, and an oven. Miller’s Bake House is almost completely off the grid: Solar panels power the mill and the cold room where he retards his loaves, and the Italian deck oven is fired with wood that he chops himself. I asked if the wood imparted flavor to the bread. “It’s not about the flavor. It’s that I would rather not be a party to wars for oil.”
The afternoon I visited, Miller was agonizing over whether to add a pinch of ascorbic acid—often used to strengthen low-protein flours—to his Kamut dough. Dave disdained additives on principle, but the crop of Kamut (an ancient variety of durum wheat) that a farmer had grown for him had come in weak—low in protein—this year, and the loaves were somewhat depressed as a result. The ascorbic acid promised to help the dough hold a bit more air, but adding it meant veering ever so slightly from “the right path,” as the Miller’s Bake House Web site describes his approach. Short of landing at a bakery on Alpha Centauri, I could not have traveled farther from the Hostess plant, where ascorbic acid is one of the more natural ingredients in use. “I have met the bread monk,” I jotted in my notebook.
Dave took me into the back room to see his mill. It was a tall wooden contraption with a hopper on top that held fifty pounds of wheat at a time, feeding it gradually through an aperture that opened onto the sandwich of revolving stones inside. Though “gradually” does not do justice to the glacial pace of this machine. The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase “nose to the grindstone”: a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of warm, tan flour that slowly accumulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a whiff. Freshly milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I’d read about the etymology of the word “flour”—that it is the flower, or best part, of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled delicious.