Hyper-Local

 Three years later...

I have moved to the farm.  First-person singular. I have moved to the farm.

My beloved is on the Next Great Adventure.  His death eleven months ago changed everything and nothing.  Friluftsliv Farm was Wayne's dream, but it has, over the years and months, become my dream.  Wes Jackson, in his lovely collection of essays, has been instrumental in helping me to  begin the process of "becoming native to this place."

Wayne's cousin, Enander Johnson, then his daughter Laurie and her husband Bill Kuehn,  have farmed my father-in-law's half section of beautiful central North Dakota farmland for more than half a century.  This spring, one evening in early May, I walked the farm's southern field where hard red spring wheat had just emerged.  Our winter had been almost snow-free, following on a dry year in 2020 where we'd had about half the precipitation we would normally have expected. Farmers said they'd never planted into soil that was so powdery-dry.

 

We were still in the Easter season of the Christian liturgical year. And the pretty Easter hymn to a French Noel tune ran through my head: 

    "Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
    Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
    Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
    Love is come again like wheat that springeth green."

 

And then the spring turned into summer, and the drought continued.  By June we'd had a couple of wind storms that evoked the "Dirty Thirties" and were a perfect example of why no-till farming conserves soil. 

We made it to July.  I sent my 94 year old father-in-law photos of his adjacent fields of his wheat and corn. 

 

His back was giving him trouble and he didn't feel up to the half-hour drive from his assisted living facility to the farm to see in person.  Meteorological records indicated that this season was the driest in his long lifetime.  And there were more hot days and more days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer than any other summer in the decade I'd been in North Dakota.

 

And yet, in comparison to some other wheat in our area, this wheat was pretty nice.  Beans had been in the field last year, and an early frost ended their growth cycle earlier than usual; this meant that those beans had not had the time to pull all the moisture out of the ground.  Maybe that was part of the reason that this wheat was doing okay.

Mid-July, my father in law had a fall, and his life just kind of unraveled.  His back hurt so badly that he could not stay at home.  Lying flat in the hospital, he ended up with pneumonia.  If he was still he had little pain.  If he moved at all he suffered.  His Living Will indicated that he didn't want any extraordinary measures, and he agreed that he preferred not to be moved to a bigger hospital with an intensive care unit. His nine grandchildren all phoned and told him they loved him.  He heard them and told them that he loved them.  He began to sleep.  My brother in law and I sat with him and held his hand.  He went Home peacefully, as one of his grandsons told him again how much he loved him.  

In his younger years, Weyburn and my mother in law had been missionaries in India.  St. John's Gospel quotes Jesus saying: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24).  Don and I gave thanks for Weyburn's fruitful and rich life.  We planned and scheduled a service in September to give thanks for Weyburn with family and friends.

Don returned to Detroit. I returned to a more routine schedule.  The wheat was getting ripe.  The week after Weyburn died, Bill moved the combine onto Weyburn's field.  

Laurie took this picture and you can see how it was dry and dusty in the field.  But the sky was clear and blue after weeks of haze and smoke.   

The next morning, as Laurie and I strolled through her farmyard on our daily walk, I noticed a small puddle of plump and beautiful grains of wheat on the ground.  Was that possibly the same wheat that had just been harvested, I asked her.  It was, she said.  And she pointed to the grain bin where Weyburn's wheat had just been deposited.  I asked if she'd ever been able to bake a loaf of bread from wheat she had grown on her farm.  She hadn't, but thought it would be possible to get some.  Later that morning I had a five-quart ice cream pail of wheat that had been in the field less than 24 hours earlier.  

While I talked on the phone with my daughter later that afternoon I cleaned the wheat by hand.  It was virtually weed free and, apart from a little bit of dust and a couple of insects, the only things I had to pull out were a couple of teaspoons of what Bill calls "white caps," the very tips of the wheat stalks that sometimes break off and thus retain their hulls.  

It was time to mill the grain.  Normally, my Mockmill sees beautiful grain that I purchase 35 pounds at a time from Breadtopia, a midwestern company that supplies all kinds of products for making bread.  I once used it to mill grain from the field of a friend who grows organic wheat.  This was a first, though, to be able to mill wheat that I had watched grow from tender green grassy leaves.  

I mixed this very special flour with equal parts by weight of high protein bread flour.  (1000 g bread flour, 1000 g fresh-milled wheat flour, in this case the variety of wheat is called Ingmar.)

I added in warm water (1450 g warm water), stirred it in, covered it, and allowed the mixture to rest for an hour or two. This process is called "autolysing."  It can help the dough to rise better and be more flexible.

 

 

To make the kind of wild-yeast sourdough bread I wanted, I then added salt (40 g sea salt), the wild yeast culture (100 g of each culture), and a little more (about 100 g) water.  (I have two different cultures.  One is the one I started myself and the other came from a friend's mom, who claims to have got it more than 40 years ago from a guy in Alaska who had used it in a logging camp kitchen for 30 years. If this story isn't true, it should be!  I don't honestly see a difference in the product when I use one or the other, but I just kind of love using both.)

 

This mixture all gets combined by hand.  It is a tactile joy to mix this dough and feel it come together. But it is not a process one can do with one hand while making pictures with the other!

It starts out like this:

 Rather than kneading as one traditionally does with dough that will go into bread pans, one does this process called "stretch and fold."  The gluten develops and at first you just make the dough into a ball and let it sit and relax as it rises.  The little yeast organisms are releasing carbon dioxide and the glutinous dough stretches and holds those bubbles.  

When the dough relaxes after 20-40 minutes, it's time for another stretch-and-fold.  In between, I make supper or check emails.  Often I will do 3 to 5 stretch-and-folds over the course of 3-4 hours.  Then it's time to put the dough into the bamboo baskets, called bannetons, for its final overnight rise on the counter and in the fridge.  

Here are a couple photos of the stretch-and-fold process.

 

I flour the countertop when I'm ready to shape the dough into loaves.  I dump the dough out onto the counter and divide it into 3 big loaves and two smaller ones.  

The process of shaping the dough into loaves also involves folding, like you'd fold a letter.

When the dough is ready for its final shaping, the "skin" of the dough is stretched tight and tucked underneath so you have a ball with a smooth exterior.

 It's popped, smooth side down, into the banneton. The surface that you see below will become the bottom of the loaf when it is baked.

A great use for grocery bags!  Each loaf goes in its own grocery bag and it doesn't dry out while it's proofing.  Usually I'm doing this process fairly late in the evening, so in the summertime the loaves go directly into the refrigerator and they will rise enough in 8 to 12  hours to be ready to bake in the morning.

The loaves go the next morning in a very hot oven--about 500 degrees Fahrenheit.  What helps them rise and get the glorious crusty outer surface is plenty of steam.  They get that either in a Dutch oven that is preheated along with the oven for at least half an hour, or from a steam pan (a pan of water that boils) on the bottom shelf of the oven, while the loaves bake on a pizza stone. 

 This loaf baked in the Dutch oven with its cover on at 500 degrees for the first 20 minutes. Getting a loaf properly into the dutch oven is the primary reason I usually prefer to bake on a pizza stone.  I have terrible luck putting the loaf in properly.  The Dutch oven is VERY hot and you have to be careful not to burn yourself.  I'm sure there's a technique for doing it efficiently, but I have not found it in ten years of baking bread this way. After 20 minutes or so the cover comes off and I reset the oven temperature for about 435.  The loaf stays in the oven for about 20 more minutes, until a thermometer probe inserted into the middle of the loaf reads 205 F.   

I have the luxury of two ovens, so I can bake in both ovens and use one for the dutch oven and one for the pizza stone.  

 The water bath comes out after about 15 minutes and the temperature of the oven is dropped to about 435F. The loaves bake about 20 more minutes until they reach an internal temperature of 205 F.  And then comes the hard part: waiting for them to cool enough to slice into the loaves!

I sent this picture to Laurie so she could choose a loaf.  She chose the one on the bottom left.

It was such an honor to bake bread from wheat that Laurie and Bill had planted, cared for, and harvested. 

 Laurie ate her first slice just with butter.  But then she made a ham sandwich. 

Weyburn always insisted on having a loaf of my bread in his freezer, and he had a slice every other morning for breakfast at his assisted living place.  (He ate oatmeal the other days.)  I imagine that, as a boy, he may have had bread from flour milled from the wheat in his father's field.  But today that is a rare treat indeed.  It is only in the last few years that it is relatively easy to find and bake with single varieties of flour and know where the grain was grown.  I love being able to buy and mill grain from Breadtopia. But last week's baking experience was really exceptional.  You could say it was Hyper-local. It was Ingmar wheat grown on Friluftsliv Farm, Turtle Lake, ND,  by Bill and Laurie Kuehn, for Mary Johnson, harvested on August 4, milled August 5 and baked August 6, 2021.  We eat this bread with deep gratitude to Wayne Johnson, my late husband, who built and equipped the wonderful kitchen in the house at Friluftsliv Farm, and his father, Weyburn Johnson,  and Weyburn's father and grandfather who sought to be good stewards of this land since they homesteaded here in the 1880's.  And we remember the Mandan people who loved this land for centuries before colonization. 

Laurie and Bill have promised me some more of this wheat.  I hope I can bake bread to share at the lunch after Weyburn's memorial service next month.  Weyburn loved Jesus, who once called himself the Bread of Life.  That was the relationship that nourished Weyburn's soul.  I can't imagine a more fitting tribute than breaking bread together to nourish our bodies from Weyburn's last crop.