Operation Baguette (aka Projet Boule): Succès!

Wow, you guys. Mad props to the ancestors. Also, agriculture is clearly a team sport because I can tell you as an individual it is NOT worth it. You spend way more time and energy planting and processing grain than you get back in calories. You’d be better off spending all that time fishing and foraging for mushrooms, eggs, and berries. Well, OK, maybe if you have machines to help you with all the threshing, winnowing, and grinding, it cashes out…but then who’s going to build you those machines? Not me, I can assure you.

Threshing

I settled on a grossly inefficient manual threshing technique as follows:

• snap grain heads off stalks like 8 at a time
• stuff heads in burlap sack until full(ish)
• tie sack shut and roll on hard surface to thresh with giant rolling pin from my friend Geri (also helpful for keeping husbands in line, she told me when she gave it to me for my wedding)
• dump chaff and wheatberries from sack into winnowing basket (I actually have a couple thanks to my neighbor Mark’s estate sale [RIP])
• Walk outside, because I live in a wind tunnel, and watch the wind blow the chaff away with a satisfied smirk on my face. Then spend at least 5 additional minutes rolling unthreshed berries in my fingers to remove leftover chaff.
• Dump roughly 1/4 C of cleaned wheatberries into a bowl
• Repeat

It took me a week to thresh that one basket of grain with this method because it was so boring I could only tolerate like two 15-minute stints per day. My sister showed up for our Wright’s Beach trip at the end of the week and helped me, and it went WAY faster at that point (see note above about agriculture being a group effort). However, she declared it the “hottest, prickliest, most annoying task” she could remember doing in recent memory. Again, props to the ancestors.

Grinding and Sifting

From here on out it got easier. We ended up with 2 1/4 cups of wheatberries–not bad! Turns out I’m a precocious wheat farmer because nearly all my wheat stalks “tillered,” which means they sprouted bonus baby grain heads in addition to the main head.

I ground the berries on the finest setting on my Grain Mill attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer (pro series). This went very smoothly, and we got a gorgeous whole-wheat flour, about 3 cups-worth. But I wanted it to be as white as possible, so we sifted it in my finest mesh strainer, which was not very fine (note to self: borrow Steph’s cake-flour sifter next time). This process yielded 328 g (ca. 2 1/4 C) of a whole-wheat flour roughly like a “stone ground whole wheat” flour you’d buy at the store. It smelled crazy–very green–and tasted fantastically wheaty. We also generated about 3/4 C of wheat bran–we’ll get back to that.

Baking

I had already been toying with going all sourdough for my baguette because I had a reliable source for those recipes at Maurizio Leo’s The Perfect Loaf (the origin of the sourdough Hokkaido Whole Wheat Milk Bread recipe that I make all the time and love). But then my sister suggested we raise the ante even further and bake the bread as a dutch-oven boule on a live fire at the beach. Whoa. I only agreed because my sister is an experienced baker, and I had already given up on my Baguette Dreams due to the heaviness of my final flour (and my total lack of experience with shaping baguettes).

We used Maurizio’s Best Sourdough Bread recipe and baked off a test loaf our first night in camp using Bob’s Red Mill whole-wheat flour (the best!) and these instructions for campfire dutch oven baking. It came out pretty well overall but with a burnt bottom. So we resolved to add a layer of aluminum foil to the bottom of the pan for the next bake and spread the coals a bit differently. Then, we took a deep breath and hydrated the Operation Baguette flour and woke up the starter I had brought in the cooler from home.

The dough was an absolute dream to work with–it developed a ton of gluten just with a pinch-and-fold technique for kneading and a lot of hours of sitting around either at beach temperature or in a closed car (the perfect proofing box). My sourdough starter performed reliably (slow but strong). We didn’t quite dial in the final shaping, so the very hydrated loaf spread out a bit in the dutch oven. But the resulting bread had decent oven spring, a nice crust, a lovely crumb, a chewy texture, and an insanely strong and fresh wheaty taste. It was out of this world with the cotriade we ate for dinner that night (seriously, one of my top meals ever). It staled very quickly and was crumbly a bit by the next morning, but we still enjoyed it with scrambled eggs, potatoes, and greens. (Shout out to Steph for the vast majority of these photos as Cheryl and I were literally up to our elbows in dough).

So, Operation Baguette Projet Boule was a success! And…I don’t think I’ll do it again. Unless I find a more efficient way to process the wheat. But still, it was an incredibly valuable (and ultimately delicious) project that gave me a truly embodied sense of how much labor and expertise is involved in making the flour I so nonchalantly toss into my mixing bowl.

Oh, and sleeper MVP of Projet Boule: the bran muffins we made when we came back from camping with the leftover wheat bran from sifting. Super-delish. Would 100% make again (with someone else’s bran).