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Description

Gluten often seems to be enemy number one these days, but people with a gluten sensitivity, as opposed to an intolerance or full-blown anaphylactic allergy, often don’t realize that our bread today has significantly more gluten than it once did.

Hard red winter wheat is typically what bakers use, in part because of its high protein (read: gluten) content, which contributes to those fluffy, airy, Instagrammable loaves. In New York, however, even with hard winter wheat, it’s a challenge to get your gluten content very high.

You can grow tasty grains, but they aren’t able on their own to create enough structure for a bread that rises a lot in the oven, a phenomenon known as “oven spring” in the bread world.

Experimenting with the Warthog wheat grown by New York wheat specialist Thor Oechsner, we turned away from round Tartine-style loaves to a Scandinavian take on a spelt bread made in a pan from one of our favorite baking resources, Danish chef Trine Hahnemann.

This is not your hippie aunt’s whole wheat sandwich bread.

There’s no instant or active yeast here–just good old-fashioned sourdough, lots of rest, and freshly-ground wheat from a farmer who truly cares about how each of his grains taste.

One of our favorite things about this bread is that grinding the wheat fresh allows it to stay soft all week long for sandwiches and morning toast. I rarely need to toast mine though–even the last slice. No throwing away your heel here.

Ingredients: Freshly-milled Warthog hard red winter wheat from Oechsner Farms, water, natural levain, Amagansett Sea Salt.