WEEK
37
Indian Giver

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.
—Robert Orben, humorist and head speechwriter to President Gerald Ford

“You’re in an unusually good mood today,” Anne noted as, whistling, I prepared to load a pain au levain into the oven.

“Parchment paper,” I explained. “I can’t understand why no one ever told me about this. It’s like finding religion.”

No more worries about the dough sticking to the peel, no more cornmeal or flour burning on the oven floor. Just cover the peel with a piece of parchment paper, and slide the whole thing, paper and all, into the oven. What a relief! Bread, however, was taking a backseat to another project I had going today. I was making flour. With an Indian artifact grindstone that Mike Dooley had lent me as I left his mill.

“How do you know this is a grindstone?” I’d asked, skeptical. To me, it looked like a rock.

“Notice how symmetrical it is.” Mike traced a path along its perimeter with his hand. “See how it’s smooth on the flat side, and rough on the rounded side. And these little pockmarks are from the tools used to shape the stone. Nature doesn’t do that.”

But Native Americans do. Or, once upon a time, did. I asked how old it was.

“No way to tell. Could be a hundred and fifty, could be five thousand. I know for a fact that some of the arrowheads in the settlement where I found this in eastern Kansas were thousands of years old. You can date them from the style. Why don’t you grind some of your wheat with this,” he said, placing the stone in my hands.

Grind my wheat with a rock? Who did I look like, Pocahontas? But I hadn’t yet come up with an alternate way to grind it, having somehow neglected to address that tiny detail, and the notion of using the artifact was intriguing, so I accepted the rock.

The grindstone, 3½ inches wide by 6½ inches long and 3 inches high, weighed just over four pounds—a little less than a bag of flour—and felt good to hold. I marveled that it had been shaped by stone tools. But this was just half of the mill. If I was going to use it, I needed a companion piece on which to rub this one, with the grain in between. A slightly concave stone lifted from a freestanding wall on our property fit the bill. Hmm. I did say (“A Recipe for Disaster,” step 7) I’d resist low-hanging fruit when scavenging, but the rock was too perfect. I resolved to replace it when I was done.*

Out on the picnic table, I poured a handful of wheat into the hollow of the stone and, with both hands, ran the Indian artifact grindstone over it. The stone simply rolled over the kernels of wheat as if they were marbles. I applied some more pressure. Same result. Then I really put my back into it, rubbing vigorously back and forth, squeezing my eyes shut for an extra “umph!”

I opened them to a miracle. The stone was covered in white dust. I had made flour! The suddenness of it took me off guard, for I’d expected that the first grinding would crush the wheat into smaller pieces, and I would grind those further, and so on—After all, I was doing this by hand—and eventually I would get something resembling coarse flour, but the rock was already covered in fine flour, looking not much different from what comes out of the five-pound bag from the supermarket.

I was a miller.

Atop the flour sat a rubble of broken kernels and flakes of bran. Encouraged, I rubbed some more, and some more, as grain flew all over the place. Occasionally brushing the flour and bran into a bowl, then tossing another handful of wheat on the stone, I continued grinding, playing with the motion, moving from a back-and-forth action to a tight circular one, humming a mock Indian song—that is, I’m sorry to say, the Atlanta Braves war chant.

Two hours later, a small mound of flour forming in the bottom of my bowl, Anne came outside to check on the progress of her white man and was impressed. “Flour! But how are you going to grind the bran flakes?”

“I’m not. You’re going to sieve them out, Minnehaha. We’re making white flour.”

This was the greatest surprise of the entire endeavor. I’d expected that I could only get whole wheat flour from hand grinding, but I’d learned more about wheat in the past two hours than in eight months of reading and research. It was one thing having Mike explain what was happening inside Bay State’s steel-roller mills; I had discovered firsthand what makes wheat so uniquely suitable for milling. The three parts of wheat—endosperm, bran, and germ—react very differently to the pressure of the stone. The starchy endosperm, the white part of the kernel, literally shatters into powder (aka flour), while the tough bran breaks off fairly cleanly into large flakes that can be sieved. The tiny wheat germ, the embryo of the seed, is malleable owing to its high oil content and thus gets flattened. The different mechanical properties of each part of the seed are what make milling and separation possible, and I realized we could take advantage of them ourselves to make white (or whitish) flour from our garden-grown, Indian-stone-ground wheat.

Traditionally, stone millers silk-screened the ground wheat—like printing a T-shirt, but forcing wheat instead of ink through the fabric—in a process called bolting, but Anne and I used an old window screen in an aluminum frame. While I continued to grind, Anne rubbed the flour back and forth with our metal bench scraper. What fell through was unmistakably white flour, with small flecks of bran and germ.

“Can I put this on yogurt?” Anne asked, looking at the bran that remained on the screen. I expressed some doubts about the culinary properties of raw wheat bran, but we saved it, anyway. Plus, I wanted to use it to decorate the tops of the loaves I was going to make with my flour.

The net result of our long day was a mere eight ounces of flour and a quart container of bran. On the one hand, it was heady and exciting to be milling with this ancient grindstone that had passed through the hands of countless Indians (I no longer had to be convinced of its authenticity), and the prospect of baking with my own stone-ground wheat was almost thrilling. On the other hand, we’d hardly made a dent in the bucket of grain. I’d have to find another way to grind the rest.

Shortly after, an e-mail from Mike threatened to make that issue moot. I’d given him a sample of my wheat berries for analysis, and he was surprised by the results. “This wheat appears to be soft red winter. Would that be right? If so, it may not want to bake a good loaf of bread.”

It may not want to bake—what?! I called him. “Are you sure?” The protein level had come in at barely 9 percent, far below the 11 to 12 percent level of even all-purpose flour, let alone bread flour, which is nearly 13 percent. My flour was apparently more suitable for making, say, croissants than pain de campagne.

The protein level, of course, is a measure of the gluten critical to bread making. Soft wheat, whether winter or spring, is far lower in protein and is used in pastries, piecrusts, and cookies, where bread or even all-purpose flour would be too tough. What is sold as “cake flour” is from the softest wheat, with a protein level of only 5 to 8 percent.*

“We overnighted some to our Minneapolis lab to double-check our own laboratory findings. It sure looks like soft red,” Mike said.

No wonder it’d been so easy to grind.

Anne saw me scowling and asked what was wrong.

“White man tell me I grow wheat for many moons,” I said, “to make flour only good for cupcakes.”