wheat grain

This week, the bins at my nearest Whole Foods contained only two types of wheat grain along with a few other more exotic types. They all suited me. Their protein value are all greater than so-called all purpose flour and so are perfectly suited for bread. I decided on a soft white spring wheat, as opposed to a hard red, of the two wheat grains that were available, and spelt, which is an evolutionarily earlier type that doesn't release its husk. Fine with me, if it doesn't release it's husk, I'm keeping the husks anyway. That's my new thing, I'm into husks. These two types of grain, the wheat and the spelt, were milled together. The last time I milled, I decided the flour was too fine, too indistinctly whole-grain, so this time I backed off a little bit. It's still a little too fine to suit me. I'm only about 1/3 of the way done. The machine began to heat up and I didn't want heat to be introduced to my tender flour so I shut it off. The collection bowl was completely full. I stopped just in time, otherwise, I don't know what would have happened if I ran it past the mill's capacity to hold the milled flour and began backing up. Can you imagine?

I was chewing those spelt grains while I watched the mill work. It sounds like a very loud vacuum cleaner. When it's shut off, it sounds like a jet engine firing down.

The NorthWestern sourdough starter was removed from cold storage and revived. It's in the form of a wad of dense yeast cake. It weighed 4 oz so it was replenished with 4 oz of water and enough of the milled flour to form a thick paste. The milled flour, above, which is whole wheat (and spelt), will ultimately constitute no more than 1/3 of the total amount flour to be used to form the loaves of bread. But for now, the exhausted yeast is feasting on unadulterated whole grain. As such, even though the yeast culture is tired and nearly dead, it will be competing with yeast already present on the grain that was milled. They're going to have a war, these two cultures of grain, the wet cake, and the dried piggy-backing organisms, both in hibernation up to this point but now abruptly awakened and revitalized, and the NorthWestern culture will prevail in this conflict by sheer force of numbers. Although nearly dead, it's not totally dead, and it's numbers are concentrated. The piggy-backing yeast and bacteria is not concentrated, so it will lose the yeast competition, although some organisms will probably survive and be inducted, impressed if you like, into the NorthWestern army of campaigning organisms. That's the way I see this inside my head. In real life, it's probably nicer than that.