Challah

In mid-April, around the period of this-stay-in-place-thing-has-already-gone-on-forever-how-much-longer-will-it-last (a lot longer, it turns out), I decided that I needed a way to make different days feel, well, different. Based not on religious practice but on a desire for a ritual to regulate the week, I started to make challah every Friday. For a few short weeks (three weeks, to be exact), while winter still hovered over Chicago, it was a great way to welcome in the weekend.

Over the years I’ve tried a few challah recipes, and this one is easily my favorite. (Hot tip: for anyone in a place where good hamburger rolls are difficult to find, you can make great rolls out of challah dough.) This recipe comes from Tori Avey, whose blog is my go-to for all Jewish foods. When I first made this challah, we discussed making French toast out of it. That never happened, since the challah never lasted long enough to get stale. (Or until Sunday, the day of Big Breakfasts.)

Wheat is the focus for this week. It’s such an integral part of our food system and yet I knew very little about it. Sure, I knew that it grows in the Midwest, like corn and soy, but I didn’t realize that it actually grows in 42 states. And I certainly didn’t realize that there are six types of wheat: hard red winter, hard red spring, soft red winter, soft white, hard white, and durum. Each type grows in different regions, has varying amounts of protein, and therefore is best suited for different uses. For instance, durum is best used for pasta, soft red wheat is generally used for cookies, and hard red spring is often used for bread. While the US produces mainly hard red wheat (according to one estimate, 60 percent of US wheat is hard red), European wheat is generally of the soft variety. For anyone who has had the frustration of using European flour to bake American chocolate chip cookies, the difference in the amount of protein in the wheat, as well as much lower amounts of the mineral selenium in European wheat, helps to explain why baking such simple recipes can go so terribly wrong.

Most wheat is consumed in the same country in which it is grown, although some of the larger producers also export. China produces the most wheat in the world, at 17 percent; India produces 13 percent; and the US, Russia, and France each produce 7 percent of the world’s wheat. In the US, wheat is the third most-grown crop, just after corn and soy. The US exports about half of what we produce. Of the half we keep, we consume about three-quarters of the wheat and only use one-quarter as animal feed. In contrast, in Europe, about half of wheat is used to feed animals. 

Global wheat production has tripled since the 1960s. However, the amount of land used to grow wheat has not increased significantly, primarily due to the increased use of pesticides and fertilizers and expanded uses of irrigation. These new technologies have allowed the yield to keep pace with the increasing demand without wheat expanding into more land. Wheat production consumes less water than soy, but it still requires a lot of water – according to one estimate it takes 1,619 liters of water to produce 1 kilogram of wheat. This is in part because it’s grown in such large quantities on large areas of land. This is especially problematic in areas that have high water stress, like China and India. Even in the US, irrigation has used up much of the groundwater in aquifers, like the Ogallala Aquifer, in the Great Plains. 

While the use of fertilizers and pesticides on wheat seems to be a problem, information can be hard to find. It seems that farmers rarely use glyphosate – also known as Roundup – on wheat (it’s mainly used for corn, soy, and cotton), but they do use fertilizers that can cause environmental harm. According to Engage the Chain, a website that provides an overview of environmental and social risks for commodities, US wheat producers generally apply nitrate fertilizer to wheat. (According to one statistic from 2009, 80 percent of wheat had nitrate fertilizer applied to it.) Nitrates used to grow wheat (and soy and corn) seep into waterways and every year cause a large dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. This year the dead zone is likely to be about the size of Delaware and Connecticut combined.

Although I don’t believe we can buy our way out of these problems – we need to change regulations, not just purchase organic flour – there are some really great small mills that I (and everyone else) discovered during the sourdough-baking period of Covid. So far I’ve bought flour (including rye flour, spelt, buckwheat, and more) from Maine Mills and Zingerman’s, and I’ve been wanting to try flour from Janie’s Mill, a local mill in Illinois. These mills all ship within the US and the quality of flour is really great, although shipping costs can be high. Additionally, there are a couple of larger companies that are employee-owned and sell good flour. Bob’s Red Mill and King Arthur Flour are both employee-owned, and King Arthur is also a certified Benefit-corporation, or B-corp. A B-corp is a company that focuses on more than on maximizing shareholder profit. It also acknowledges that it must take employees’ and other stakeholders’ well-being into account. While neither of these two larger companies seems to source purely organic wheat, they are making efforts to source more of it. It’s a midway point between Pillsbury and small mills that are pretty expensive.

If you want to learn more about wheat production, take a look at Engage the Chain. And check out this recent article from the New York Times on small grain companies as a path for the US economy.