Whole Wheat Scone With Feta, Olives and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

Last year I learned about a website here in Turkey that puts small-scale food producers directly in touch with the consumers, Toprakana. As I started my pursuit for the perfect sourdough to serve at Babushka, I placed my first order for a few bags of flour from a small watermill where they grind a blend of local wheat varieties into the whole grain flour (they do rye and corn too, needless to say, all whole grain).

My order arrived the morning after I placed it; the flour in the cotton bags without a single label was milled that very week! A tremendous difference from the whole wheat flour milled half a year ago you can get at the local stores. The stone-ground flour looked different too. The commercial varieties felt almost starch-like silky and looked predominantly white with occasional grayish-brownish freckles of bran as if the flour was refined from the bran, milled and then some bran was integrated back. The stone-milled whole wheat flour felt coarse and had a pleasant a golden brown tint. Its bran was abundant and visible. I was jumping with joy thinking about the new highs my baking was going to climb.

Why this new whole wheat flour is a big deal for me? I used to be satisfied with the while flour in the past and was super proud of that. When it comes to baking, white flour is fantastic to work with: the gluten develops quickly resulting in the peckled with airy holes breads and light cakes. It keeps well. And over decades we have developed a taste for it, so much in fact that whole wheat baked goods become a hard sale anywhere outside of the health stores.

My wakeup call was Dan Barber’s book “The Third Plate” where the chef of the celebrated New York farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill discusses the future of food and the role that chefs have got in shaping it. He addresses this question by investigating the historical, geographical and cultural context that perpetuates certain products, one of them being wheat.

Barber talks about the developments specific for the US, but sooner or later the same realities became relevant for any more or less developed country. He points that prior to the early 19th century wheat was a grain of great character with diverse crops varying from farm to farm, year to year. The existing technology conditioned consumption of the grain where it was milled: the stone mills crashed the kernels releasing the oil that turned the flour rancid within few days. The development of transportation by water and by rail created opportunities for centralized milling that became even easier with the introduction of the roller mills able to remove the germ and bran (outer layers of a wheat kernel) from the endosperm to produce white flour that keeps well and travels far. “Overnight, flour became commodity,” Barber observes.

There is more to the story. Mineral-loaded bran and germ rich in fats and nutrition may represent less than 20% of the wheat kernel’s weight, but make up for 80%of its nutrients. We get only 20% of the potential wheat nutrients every time we eat something made with white flour. How come that we choose to trash 80% of the wheat nutritional power? If the nature created the wheat kernel to have it all, endosperm, germ and bran, how could we simply remove what’s “inconvenient”?

Finally, Barber puts on his chef hat and mentions the consequence that upset him most: “Stone-milled flour retained a golden hue from the crushed germ’s oil and was fragrant with bits of nutty bran.. We did not just killed wheat. We killed the flavor”. For a moment, think about the taste of white bread. How do you describe it? Unless the white bread was enriched with oil / butter or eggs and flavored, what comes to my mind is bland. Yes, bland and good for nothing but carrying the flavor of the foods we dip, scoop or wipe with this bread.

In his book Barber continues his pursuit for the wheat renaissance investigating the opportunities of bringing farmers and millers together, breading new wheat varieties for flavor and the challenges of integrating whole wheat along with the other grains in his restaurant’s menu. After all, it is the responsibility of the chef not to gather the best ingredients at the farmers market, but to create demand for the products that promote sustainable agriculture and sustainable society.

That’s why I am celebrating my discovery of the stone-ground whole wheat flour and switching gears in my baking. Apart from the Babushka sourdough bread that got a beautiful golden brown color and nutty flavor from the artisanal whole wheat flour, I am not shy to use whole wheat flour in anything I bake. Pancakes? Yes. Cookies? Of course. Chocolate cake? Why not. Depending on the occasion I can still add a part of white flour, but in many cases I go 100% whole wheat without thinking twice.

These scones are a great example. We prefer savory so I modified the original recipe suggesting sweet scones. Loaded with feta cheese, olives, sun-dried tomatoes and herbs, they go well for breakfast (with plenty of village butter), as an afternoon tea snack or even instead of bread along with nourishing soups. I can never decide if I prefer their soft crumb or the crunchy top and sides, so I can only keep savoring these whole wheat beauties to make my mind.