Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On Friday it was a loaf of bread—or, rather, eight loaves of bread—and an opportunity to spend the day doing something I loved. Today it is a moral dilemma, and possibly an exercise in decadence. Of course, it was a moral dilemma, and possibly an exercise in decadence, long before this weekend. It was only this weekend that my conscience finally caught up to reality. I realize fully that my conscience is a little slow on the uptake.
The plan had been simple: Make a batch of pain brié as I’d been taught to make it in culinary school. Tell an amusing story about how, back in school, I had beaten that damn dough for half an hour and it had never, ever smoothed out. Discover that the first batch I’d made in ten years was spoiled by an overproofed sponge and a surfeit of flour (I had forgotten that my instructors who had written our bread curriculum had built 10% additional flour into the base recipes, and I had forgotten to leave it out). Make another batch, then decide to make a control batch with a lower-protein flour, to see if I could achieve a smoother dough. Spend a day in the kitchen, rediscovering how malty and clean is the scent of flour and water being mixed together; how satisfying is the whole shaping process, turning par-shaped loaves into bâtards, feeling air bubbles pop under gentle pressure, how thrilling it is to draw a razor blade against the top of an oven-bound loaf and get it right on the first whoosh. Bake the breads. Pull them out of the oven. Love the way the hot crust crackles in the cool air. Note ruefully that the bottoms are burned thanks to one of the oven racks being placed too closely to the bottom of the oven. Let it cool. Let it rest. Taste it. Discover, sadly, that the loaves made with bread flour taste like nothing, while the loaves made with all-purpose flour taste only marginally better than nothing. They’re definitely not reflective of the work I put into them. Still, there’s nothing shabby about having a freezer full of sandwich-suitable bread, and a story to tell about it. Vow to try again with an overnight-risen dough. Tell the story, all of it.
Now, I realize I’m talking about all of this as if it has occurred in a vacuum. It has not. Long before I decided to embark on this little baking adventure, the price of flour was increasing, and I knew this. I confess now—and I’m embarrassed to confess this—that I didn’t pay too much attention to root causes. Ever since oil prices began to climb, I took it for granted that eventually these increases would result in higher prices for food. When the price of milk began to climb, I knew that it was due to a combination of increased fuel costs and increased feed costs: as more corn is being used to produce ethanol, less of it is available for animal feed. I started seeing a news story here, an email from my flour company of choice there, an occasional news report in between: the price of flour is going up. I didn’t pay too much attention. I would be still be buying all the flour I needed; I’d just be paying more for it. It’s all about the fuel. Nothing to see here.
It’s not all about the fuel. Thanks to this article in Sunday’s New York Times, I know just how wrong I was. Fuel pricing is a factor, of course. So is the diversion of land from wheat crops to corn crops to feed the growing market for biofuels. So is the weak dollar. So is the drought in Australia, which has proven devastating for Australian wheat crops, and which has sent the buyers of Australian wheat to look to the U.S. for exports. So is the growing global demand for wheat-based foods like bread and noodles, even—especially—in countries where they have not historically been staples. All of these factors have made wheat a dear commodity, growing dearer by the day, and have plunged the U.S. grain reserve to its lowest level since 1947.
I went to bed on Sunday, contemplating all of this. On Monday morning, I walked past the bakery around the corner on my way to the laundromat and found this article, laminated, hanging in the front window. It was then that I realized just how dire the situation has become. We now have 30-year-old and 50-year-old bakeries in the city, pleading with their customers to remain patient, and to understand that nobody is getting rich off that extra 40 cents being charged for bread. We have decades-old businesses, well established in the community, facing closure because they can’t continue to absorb these increases indefinitely, and there does not seem to be any end in sight.
Dear friends, I am confounded. I do not know whether I am part of the problem or part of the solution. Is it better to keep buying flour, to continue patronizing a company whose product I really like, to help keep them afloat through the rough waters of a grain shortage? Or should I realize that I am part of that insistent global demand for wheat and wheat products, and modify my flour purchases accordingly? Do home bakers use enough flour to even register as a blip on the radar of world commodity markets? Is this all, in fact, an exercise in decadence?
Posted by
Bakerina at 09:12 PM in
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Comments •
OKay, I’m going to ignore the large moral dilemma, not because I don’t find it interesting (I do) but because I don’t have a good answer for you and I’m not in a good enough headspace to spent the time contemplating the answer.
However, I am curious. Why a 10% increase of flour in the written recipes?
It’s a huge dilemma, isn’t it. You try to be as conscientious a buyer as you can, but sometimes the enormity of the problem beggars belief.
I’d say that as a home baker, you would be a ‘blip’. Though calling someone as beautiful as you a ‘blip’ seems more than a little ridiculous.
It’s interesting that you don’t mention the first problem that would occur to me. Are your independent bakers being undercut by chain stores and supermarkets? The price rise article doesn’t seem to mention the ‘other’ competitors. Maybe it’s just a given.
I think all you can do is try and balance your home-baking with as much support for the independent bakers as you can stomach (forgive the pun).
And that photo, Bake? Are you sure that bread porn hasn’t been outlawed? I can almost smell it.
I am sure that the home bakers are not making even a marginal blip on the radar of the wheat crisis. Even a hardcore home baker like yourself probably doesn’t go through more than 10 lbs of flour a week (this is a REALLY high estimate, I think), so when you compare it to the commercial bakeries that get flour shipped to them in such mass quantities that it would make my head spin, I feel sure that your purchase of flour is not contributing to the demise of small local bakeries.
Oh, thank you, dear ones. 
That said, I should have specified: I was less concerned about how my flour purchases affect the local bakeries—although, of course, I’m deeply concerned about them—than about their place in the worldwide demand for wheat. This is probably not the best analogy to make, but I think of the fish that have been overfished. When environmental groups warned that cod stocks were being depleted at an alarming rate, I vowed to stop eating cod. Now, I eat cod maybe two or three times a year, either as part of a fish/chip plate or as part of a fried codfish puff sandwich from the Jamaican food cart near Sotheby’s. Obviously this is a drop in the bucket of worldwide demand for cod, but I still feel a twinge at the thought of being even a tiny part of a problem. Of course, no one has said yet that wheat is an endangered commodity, so it might be an apples/oranges comparison.
Bottom line: I’ll probably keep buying flour, at least until the government tells me I have to stop. But I’ll also probably still feel guilty about it. 
To answer Rachel’s question: The teachers who wrote the bread curriculum for my program said that the easiest variable to manipulate is the amount of flour you add to the dough. The more humid the air, the more moisture is in the flour, and thus the more flour you need to form a workable dough. So they deliberately included a 10% surfeit of flour in the overall formula, then advised us to hold back that 10% and only add it if we needed it. Initially I thought this was kind of a bassackwards way to work—didn’t it make more sense to just write the recipe with the base amount of flour?—but I realized that it made sense in terms of getting your entire mise en place ready on the bench. If it turns out that you need that extra 10% of flour, it’s right there on your bench, not all the way across the kitchen in the bulk bin, and you don’t have to interrupt your work flow to get more.
Of course, you *do* have to remember to leave it out, and not just throw it in with your overall mix. This is not always as easy as it sounds.
Not buy wheat to help alleviate the “crisis?” Eat less wheat to help? What are you going to substitute for those missing carbs? Meat? Which is 1/6 as efficient at delivering caloric energy on a macro scale? Soy or corn from those fields that were planted in pursuit of oil/bio profits?
No, m’love, this is not an Alaskan King Crab crisis where we can back off and let the wheat population recover for a few years. This puppy is gonna be solved by… and my fingers tremble, unable almost to type these three horrible words that have been so misused by people whose politics are stupid and mean but which are utterly correct in this case… the free market.
Buck up. Pay the extra 49 cents at the bakery. Toss and extra couple quarters in their tips jar and tell ‘em you love ‘em. Pay the extra price at the supermarket for flour. Enjoy your wheat cuz they’ll be planting lots more next year.
(Aside: Speaking of irony, it’s more than a little amusing to read that the net-net greenhouse effect of biofuels appears to be at least as damaging as burning fossil fuels. My conclusion is there is a goddess in charge and she’s challenging us to do more than look for easy fixes and feel-good bandwagons.)
Back to the point. Feel free to beat me up for my flip analysis above if any of it is really stupid, I fired it off without the benefit of adequate coffee.
My first, entirely reflexive, thought is how funny it is that I sent you an email this morning about baking bread . . . before reading your post.
My second, equally reflexive, thought is that I was just thinking about Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” this morning. If you haven’t read it, let me encourage you to do so. Not only is it an incredibly clever reworking of the King Lear story, but it is also a fascinating portrait of American farming. Not to be negative, but what feeds us also kills us—on so many levels.
I read the articles you suggested, and in a similar spirit of enlightenment offer a few interesting statistics from The Observer’s recent article titled “How Cities Took Over the World.” The NY Times article mentions bread eaters in Nigeria. Well, apparently Lagos is the fastest growing city in the world. It adds 58 people AN HOUR to its population. (How do they calculate these things? I have no idea.) Shanghai’s population has increased 800% since the 1920s. There are 54.7 million residents in Greater Tokyo—which makes Greater London’s population of 7.5 million seem relatively easy to feed.
We are getting a lot of the same articles in the UK. It is pretty anxiety-making.
But I’m always one to look on the bright side, so I’d like to point out the silver lining of farmers being better off (does this mean we can cut back on the subsidies?). Also, it wouldn’t hurt Americans and Western Europeans to cut back on their own food consumption. Also, I don’t think $1.40 is much to pay for a good product that will give you quite a few meals. Like mouse so wisely says, bread’s still cheap compared to (all of the) costs of meat.
I definitely veto any argument that would lead to you (or any other home baker) ceasing to bake.
Had this been happening several years ago, I would have gone all conspiracy-theorist and blamed the Atkins people.
Right now, it just makes me sad. I don’t think home bakes should cease to bake out of fear that they’re affecting the wheat shortage. If anything, demand for wheat should be kept stable - not go down - so as not to “encourage” more farmers to convert to switchgrass or whatever the biofuel fad-of-the-day is.
because in the long run, people need to eat. More than they need to drive, even.
The other issue is about keeping the local bakeries afloat. If it were me...considering my chronic lack-of-time to do things like bake, considering that I hate grocery store bread with a flaming passion...I’d be there in the bakery, helping support them. (I don’t HAVE a bakery in my town. It’s either bread-machine bread for me, or kind of holding my nose and buying the least offensive grocery bread).
But I don’t think your baking your own bread is taking profits away from the bakery - certainly not enough to kill them. And likewise, you can’t support the bakeries on their own - if other folks in your town decide it’s not worth it to have real bakers, then the bakeries will close.
I don’t like all the moral dilemmas of this modern world. Can’t we go back to a time where we worried about the moral dilemma of our skirt lengths, or something a bit more frivolous, instead?
i think home bakers are a blip; even the most assiduous home baker is still a home baker, and has only so large an oven.
generations-old family pizzarias by me are having the up their price per slice and are pleading with customers not to desert them because of the extra 50 cents, just like your bakery. personally, i’m supporting the hell out of my local bakeries and pizzarias. i’ll always be a home baker, but my ‘hood might not always have pecoraro’s or the 2nd street bakery.
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OKay, I’m going to ignore the large moral dilemma, not because I don’t find it interesting (I do) but because I don’t have a good answer for you and I’m not in a good enough headspace to spent the time contemplating the answer.
However, I am curious. Why a 10% increase of flour in the written recipes?