touching four seasons

We've fallen into a season-driven existence here. And I don't mean simply seasonal eating. The seasons drive the cycles of our days, too. In the height of last summer, we were spending tons of time outside--my work days were bookended by garden watering and tending; we ate out on the patio, then worked in the garden or walked the trail, not coming inside until dark at 9 or 10. It was projects galore. In the depths of this winter, our garden soil is so frozen that we can't even hack out our last few carrots and beets. We tuck the animals in for the night at 3:30 or 4--although yesterday we noticed we were coming back from the sheep barn at 4:30 and it wasn't yet dark, a milestone!--and then we hunker down inside by the wood stove for evenings of cooking, playing board games, and playing music. The rain shushes on the roof and wind roars in the trees. The windows are vast and dark and show nothing at all except the reflections of the cheeriness inside.

Yet, as I am cooking dinner tonight, with the wood stove flaring orangey-red across the room, fall and summer and spring feel close. I'm cooking potatoes and carrots from our fall garden, and  roasted tomatoes (the last, sob!) from summer. They're so sweet I think they might conjure summer right here, like a potion, if I purée and drink them. And spring is on the mind; our seed order is on its way this very minute and we'll start seeding in the greenhouse in just about a month. I can feel it—the lighter evenings, the salad greens, the radishes. 

We may appear deep in hibernation, but the ground is thrumming. For a moment, the dark windows are full of promise. 

csa obsession

I have always loved the idea of CSAs since I first read about them back in my intern days at Mountaineers Books (in The Urban Farm Handbook). But I've never been a part of a CSA until last fall. And the shipment that arrives on our doorstep once a month isn't full of vegetables but of flour!

I first read about Bluebird Grain Farms and their grain CSA in the same book I mentioned above (it's a great book). I've dreamed about doing this CSA since two falls ago, when I realized how much flour we were using for our weekly loaf of no-knead bread--and how little I knew about it. We were using mostly white bread flour because it bakes into soft open crumb bread, but white flour is basically wheat with its most nutritious parts, the bran and the germ, removed. Bread was a big part of our weekly diet. We weren't (and still aren't!) going to change that. Were we actually eating anything worthwhile?

Fast forward a year, and we finally signed up for the CSA. Bluebird Grain Farms is just across the pass from our home; they grow, harvest, and mill organic hard red spring and hard white spring wheat, as well as rye and some ancient grain varieties. They are the sort of small, family-owned business that I feel very strongly about supporting with my cash whenever possible.

This flour is milled to order. That means a number of things: the flour is young and nutritious. If you're going to eat whole grain flour because of its nutritious value, then this is the way to do it.

However, the flour is immature. Aged flour (perhaps one month or older) tends to have stronger gluten-forming properties and bakes better. Plus the bran and germ, when left in during milling, interfere with the gluten-forming properties of flour. The result? Bricks for bread, apparently, and bricks that don't even really hold together on top of that. So when we got our first CSA delivery, I did all sorts of research on baking with fresh purely whole wheat flour. Usually, you have to make compensations, a main one being adding something like vital wheat gluten, which gives those gluten networks a big kick skyward and helps the bread rise, be less dense, and not crumble apart. Also, all–whole wheat recipes often call for adding sweetener, like maple syrup or honey, to smooth whole wheat's earthy and sometimes bitter flavor. Flour from hard red wheat berries is not ideal for cakes, cookies, and pie crusts due to its high protein content. Low protein flours lead to softer baked goods. So you usually want soft red or soft white wheat flour, or not even whole wheat flour at all. (And this is really just scratching the surface of the science; I could go into waaaay more detail thanks to a bread-related project I've been deep in for work. Way more detail than most people, but luckily not Tim, or so he says! want to know). 

I decided to not make any compensations at first, for experiment's sake. And thus I discovered the mystery of Bluebird Grains flour: it needs no babying or assistance when you have the right recipes. (I did bake a few crumbly and less-than-ideal loaves before I found the right recipe). I really don't know how to explain it, because frankly you could spend decades reading forums bursting with stories about all kinds of complex workarounds for achieving the holy grail whole wheat loaf. But this flour just works. 

I make no-knead sandwich bread (http://www.veganbaking.net/recipes/breads/enriched-breads/yeasted-enriched-breads/no-knead-whole-wheat-sandwich-bread) with the hard red flour. It isn't a craggy artisan loaf with holes as big as your thumbnail. It has a tighter crumb, although not anywhere as tight as  store-bought sandwich bread. It rises. It's soft. It doesn't crumble. (Again, other sandwich recipes I tried struggled with these issues, but I've never had problems with this recipe.) And the flavor is nutty, earthy, rich, and totally worth obsessing over. 

I use hard red for pie crusts too. The end result has more heft and flavor than AP flour crusts, but it flakes and melts in your mouth just like pie crust should. For biscuits, I use hard white or einkorn. These biscuits are not the pillowy puffballs you get from a box (I do like boxed biscuits, so that's not an insult). These biscuits somehow manage to be light and hefty all at once, with a fresh deep flavor that does not actually need any honey or jam at all. In fact, honey and jam just get in the way. All you need is butter. 

I sat down to do some research tonight about baking with fresh flour, just to refresh my memory. And really, I discovered that I can't explain why I haven't had issues with it. I should. But I don't. So go buy Bluebird flour.