Whole grains get a makeover

NORWICH, Vt. -- ``If you bite, you write." So says a notice posted in the break room off the test kitchen at King Arthur Flour, where P.J. Hamel has set out four plates of brownies, marked ``B," ``S," ``P," and ``W," and workers wandering in and out are tasting pieces and scribbling notes on forms.

``What do the letters stand for?" one woman asks.

``That's P.J.'s double-secret probation code," replies Susan Reid, Hamel's fellow baker and author. ``And I'm not about to break it."

In fact, the initials represent the flours used in each batch: barley, spelt, whole wheat pastry flour, and traditional whole wheat. All these grains are far more commonly associated with hearty, heavy loaves of bread than with fudgy confections or flaky pastry, but King Arthur is out to change that perception, or at least make a dent in it. In the wake of new awareness of the benefits of whole grains -- they show up in the USDA's new food pyramid, for one -- the bakers at the nation's oldest flour company are determined to find appetizing ways to bake with them.

Take barley. Using it whole in a pilaf is one thing, but grinding it into flour and putting in a brownie? ``I've had such a revelation with barley," Hamel says as she rolls out a whole wheat pie crust. ``Barley -- isn't that what you put in soup? I had never even heard of barley flour, but it's so nice and mild."

As they put finishing touches on a comprehensive whole grain baking cookbook, scheduled for publication this fall, Reid, Hamel, and company demonstrate the tweaks and tradeoffs they've been making on recipes as diverse as zucchini bread, apple cake, and even pies and croissants. The goal: for each recipe to use whole grains for at least half the flour. ``The rule was, it has to taste good first, and it happens to be made with whole grains," Hamel says.

In many cases, easier said than done. When Reid, the book's primary author, went to work on an apple cake, for instance, she started with a 1991 recipe that uses all-purpose flour, granulated sugar, and shortening. ``I decided to take it around the block," she says, first just swapping in whole wheat flour, buffing up the spices, replacing some of the regular sugar with brown and butter for shortening to get around the trans fats .

``On the first pass, it was dry and tasteless," she says, as she spreads batter in a square pan.

For the second test, in went vanilla, another egg, and one of the test kitchen's secret ingredients: orange juice, which they knew would help counteract the bitter flavor of the whole wheat flour. Better, but the texture and sweetness still weren't right. She kept tinkering. Another 1/2 cup brown sugar, apple juice instead of orange, less baking soda, a little baking powder. Bingo. In the introduction to the recipe that will appear in ``King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking," Reid writes, ``Even after its second day on the taste-testing table, it was generating a buzz. One [coworker] said, `That's so good, you can make it at my funeral!' "

Some of the categories were a particular challenge. When Reid started on poundcakes, ``I made some of the worst, curdled things you ever saw," she says. She switched to the muffin chapter, ``to build my confidence back."

Ultimately, though, Reid found that cakes with recipes that begin with creaming sugar and butter weren't too affected by whole grain flours, because they got their structure from the creaming and the flour merely provided support. She and the others who worked on the cookbook were intent on contradicting the perception of whole grain baking. ``I call it punishment food," Reid says. ``You know, all those hippie nasty desserts that people remember from Mom's days in the '60s."

On the cover will be the lightest possible cake imaginable. It's raspberry-lemon, with a lemon buttercream, made with whole-wheat pastry flour.

Breads would seem a more naturally easy subject matter , but they weren't without difficulty.

Wheat is prized in bread baking for its remarkable ability to be leavened by yeast and yet still hold its shape. That's because of gluten, the substance produced when two proteins in the endosperm, the interior part of the wheat berry, are ground and kneaded with a liquid. Gluten stretches and expands, which is what allows bread to rise and what allows pasta makers to roll out thin sheets.

Ever since ancient Greece and Rome, when white flour became elite because it was so difficult to process, bakers have known that whole wheat doesn't make as light of a loaf. Besides milling it to remove the berry's outer hull, ``they did awful things to flour to make it really white," says Hamel. ``They added ground-up bones to it and chalk. Only recently in the history of flour have we come back to thinking that whole grain flours are a good thing."

Whole wheat, like other whole grains, is more nutritious than the processed grain because of the fiber and other nutrients contained in the bran and the germ. When used in baking, though, the sharp shards of bran cut through the strands of gluten, interfering with its development. Instead of being trapped in the gluten's ``matrix," the bubbles that are created by yeast or another leavener, such as eggs or baking powder, escape -- and the bread becomes denser.

One way to compensate is to also use some bread flour, which is made from a higher-protein (or ``harder") wheat and therefore develops more gluten. ``We like to think of bread flour as the underwire bra of breads," Reid says, cupping her hands in front of her chest. ``It helps everything stay up a little bit."

Another favorite is white whole wheat flour, which sounds like an oxymoron. Most hard wheats, according to the company's explanatory literature, are high-protein red wheats, while white whole wheat is a strain that has the same nutritional value but without an acid that produces the red color -- and that tannic, bitter taste that Reid and Hamel use fruit juice to counteract. When used in baking, the same difficulties developing gluten will happen, but the flavor is much lighter.

As Hamel demonstrates when she rolls out a pie crust, though, pastries don't suffer quite the same problems, because the goal is tenderness, and bakers try to handle them delicately and minimize gluten development. You still need some gluten, which is why barley flour created a pie crust with edges that fell apart in the oven. ``We added an egg," she says.

When the morning of baking ends, it's time for lunch at a picnic table outside, which gives the women another chance to taste their labors (a spelt-crust pizza with mushrooms and caramelize d onions) and to trade war stories.

When asked which of the dozen grains that made it into the book was the most difficult to work with, they practically yell in unison: ``Buckwheat!" Quinoa was a close runner-up. ``A lot of them have this musty aftertaste in the finish," says Reid, shuddering.

Sue Gray, test kitchen director, says the bakers could easily lose perspective. ``When you start looking at anything in depth, there are so many recipes you could keep testing forever. When is it finally good enough?"

As Reid describes it, ``You get a thing in your head and you can taste it, you know what the texture should be, and that's where you want to go, and sometimes the ingredients will take you somewhere else. What's in your head may not exist. But something else may exist that's really good, and if you stay really stubborn you might miss it."

That something, in fact, might be a brownie made with barley.

The Baker's Store, King Arthur Flour, 135 Route 5 South,Norwich, Vt., 802-649-3361, www.kingarthurflour.com.

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.