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A GIFT FROM THE FARM:
Save the Date for our annual customer appreciation day, October 26th.
As you know, we dig the potatoes in August and then plant a cover crop asap. This means no potatoes to glean in October. So, we are digging the potatoes
TOMORROW, SUNDAY, AUGUST 17th.
You are invited to glean from the potato patch from 2:30 to 4pm.
Help with potato harvest would be much appreciated from 10:30 to 2:30
Sarahlee in the wheat field. Photo by Josheph Haeberle
Upon request from Nicole Amanda, here’s the skinny on grains at Rainshadow.
We started as a vegetable garden back in 2010. The most pivotal moment for the farm happened at an onion display in a Grocery Outlet. I had been eating from the farm all summer and something about buying food after that made me feel like a failure. I decided at that moment to really raise the food I eat. Everything from that point was the careful construction of the farm ecosystem. I vowed to raise enough in the summer to preserve for fall, winter, and spring. I would build infrastructure to house the food. I would test the hardiest greens with the bitterest winters to see what would grow. Right there at the onion display my life’s work came in to focus.
Notably, the biggest thing the farm was missing were staple grains. Not only for the full diet, but also for crop rotation to break up disease cycles and aerate the soil for the vegetables. I searched for old varieties of grain that do well in an organic system and our climate. Then we bought a combine for harvest and a mill for processing.
Today we grow several grains on rotation and mill them in small batches. These include:
- Red Fife, a landrace hard red winter wheat
- Stephens soft white winter wheat
- Painted Mountain corn for flour
- Roy’s Calais Flint corn for polenta
- Common Buckwheat
- Tibetan black barley
As a full diet member, Nicole Amanda’s main questions were around how in the heck to make a loaf of bread with our wheat flours. Here are the numbers:
Hard Red:
- 11.2% protein.
- 10.2% moisture
- 31.1 wet gluten (%, 14% mb)
Soft White:
- 10.1% protein.
- 11.3% moisture
- 24.2 wet gluten (%, 14% mb)
What does that even mean? I’ve been combing back through Dan Barber’s The Third Plate, ‘Seed’ chapter, which is mostly about grains. He interviews Stephen Jones from the Bread Lab up in Washington:
“10.5% protein is a good number if you ask me, Steve said, but an industrial bread baking company would laugh in your face and call it wimpy wheat. 14% is manly-man wheat with high gluten.
I told Steve I once read that in France, bread wheat measuring over 11.5% protein is considered junk.
That’s right, Steve said, And yet the French aren’t maligned for wimpy flour. I mean, have you ever heard someone say, ‘Man, those French people, they don’t know how to bake a good loaf of bread’?
Steve said, bread bakers and eaters are doing their part to poison the environment by demanding those high protein numbers. Forget it, its just not possible without chemical nitrogen.
This is why Steve built the lab to appeal to the people who aren’t obsessed with protein, but with quality of the loaf. Craft bakers, many of whom come out of the French tradition of bread baking, rarely add sugar, and the best of them don’t use yeast or excessive amounts of salt. The natural yeast and bacteria present in the flour are activated by fermentation (mix flour and water and wait — the wait being the crucial ingredient). The starches break down and the sugars help develop a depth of flavor and complexity that doesn’t exist in industrial breads.
Granted, Steve said, it’s a day and a half to make a loaf, versus twenty minutes, but you develop texture, flavor, and most likely a lot better nutrition.”
So here we are at Rainshadow with flour that at least the French would approve of. We just have to figure out how use it well. Bread baking is an art and requires precise measurements and note taking if you really want to hack it. You gotta be a scientist and keep track of all of your variables.
It is also important to know that each harvest will have different numbers, which I will be sharing with the full diet members, because we have to re-learn how to use the flour for every harvest. Luckily we raise enough of a grain to last us about 5 years in dry storage while we grow out all the other grains on rotation. Dan Barber’s pastry chef, Alex, said “It’s like a good wine, every year is different. So you have to adjust. Every time you have to relearn it. But that’s the nice thing about these flours. You just have to follow, basically, nature’s instructions.”
Lol, godspeed bakers.
At Rainshadow we only offer un-sifted whole wheat. Whole wheat is the entire kernel preserved in the flour. That means that it is also all of the oils and vitamins from the grain. Most flour is stripped of its oils and nutrients to make it shelf stable with potassium bromate (KBrO3), an oxidizing agent, then “enriched” to replace some fo the vitamins. This created one of the original fast foods, back in the 50’s, and is what you find at the store today. When baking with Rainshadow flour, you may want to consider some sifting so that the bran doesn’t break the gluten strands, but you must be aware that you are reducing the nutrient value when you do this.
In our house, Dylan makes sourdough bread regularly and he is certainly on a journey. We have been quite pleased with the results despite it being a bit dense. The flavor is outstanding and it feels good to our bodies. I am of course biased, but I would rather eat what I’ve grown than really anything else, no matter what.
Joe Martinez delivers fresh salmon to the farm every week. You can order from the Add-ons page. Pick up available:
- Every Wednesday at the Bend Farmer’s Market from 11am-3pm
- Our Farm Store at 71290 Holmes Road on Thursday: 11am–3pm
Friday: 11am–5pm
Saturday: 9am–3pm - Every Sunday at the Sisters Farmer’s Market from 10am-2pm
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