What’s Up with Wheat?
This is common wheat.
Image courtesy of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat#/media/File:Wheat_close-up.JPG
There are hundreds of types of wheat out there. Hundreds. We eat but a handful of them! This post will cover only common wheat in depth and will include brief information about the other wheats we tend to bake with, because each of these wheats we do eat deserve to be treated individually so as to explore each one in a bit more depth. Normally, our Wednesday recipes seek to exemplify whatever it is I felt like talking about the prior Sunday, but there will be some variance here. We have a LOT of starters, y’all, and I am likely to be a bit out of order while I’m playing with them!
Y’all, this is the single greatest aspect of my job. True Strike.
When we think about wheat, we generally think of common wheat (Triticum aestivum). Other wheat types recently have started to get a lot more traffic, even if only found in the hippie section of the grocery store. These fun wheats include spelt, emmer, einkorn, khorasan (also called “Kamut” by trademarked brand name), and durum. Yep, all of these are also wheats!
There tends to be a ton of confusion about wheats, which I personally believe is largely due to advertisting campaigns whose intent is to gain profits through people’s health concerns. The primary issue to me about these campaigns is that somehow in the midst of them, the fact that the grains are still wheat often gets lost in translation. Let us, however, not say that these wheats are filled with false advertising, because the gluten structures of ancient wheats are different and can be more easily digested by lots of people who struggle with the ways in which common wheat was selectively bread (haha) into what we have today.
Image courtesy of: https://www.world-grain.com/articles/11521-lactic-acid-shows-promise-in-wheat-tempering
Common Wheat (Triticum aestivum)
Common wheat, again, is what we think of when we think of wheat. Big, fluffy loaves of sandwich bread, crispy crusted artisan loaves with giant pockets in the crumb, cookies, cakes, all these things (except pasta!) are all generally made with common wheat.
Before we delve too deeply into the history of common wheat, let’s clarify a few terms:
Red wheat: the bran of this wheat has a reddish hue, making the kernel look red; higher protein content. This wheat is more bitter with a stronger flavor
White wheat: the bran of this wheat is off-white colored, making the kernel look white-ish; lower protein content. This wheat is sweeter with a milder flavor
Hard wheat: high protein content - think all-purpose flour, breads
Soft wheat: low protein content - think cakes
Winter wheat: sown in the fall and harvested in the summer; higher yields
Spring wheat: sown in the spring and harvested in the fall; lower yields
Image courtesy of: https://www.agclassroom.org/georgia/matrix/lessonplan.cfm?lpid=197
In the States, we mostly grow hard red winter wheat. That accounts for about 40% of the wheat we eat. Very little soft red wheat is grown here, but what does is largely used for cake and pastry flour. According to the USDA, winter wheats comprise 70-80% of all American production of wheat (wheat is also our largest grain crop).
The kind of common wheat a person eats generally will come down to where they live. If you live in the States (or generally the northern hemisphere), you’re most likely looking at hard red winter. If you live in Australia, you’re mostly looking at hard white wheats, which have more favorable growing conditions in the southern hemisphere. In the States, we now only average about 132 pounds of wheat consumption per capita, though it was 225 in 1879!
I could stare at wheat fields all day long. This issue is making it take a lot longer to write wheat up for y’all!
So, how did we even get wheat? It’s an interesting story. Originally, wild wheat was gathered in temperate regions and consumed, per the basically all of cultivated grains we consume. Somewhere in Turkey around 10,000 years ago, people decided to start collecting and planting wheat of their own. Naturally, they took from wheat stalks that had more and larger seeds, and then they began to select for other desirable traits. This is basically the pre-laboratory GMO system (we call it selective breeding if it’s done without a lab) humans used.
Early farmers selected for a lot of different traits, but the two most important are ones you might not expect. The first, and arguably the most important, is that they bred out stalk shattering. This is massive, y’all. Massive. Basically, stalk shattering is where a seed stalk grows and grows, and when it’s ripe they burst and allow seed to fly all over the place. This is a boon to plant propagation in the wild, because wider and uncontrolled seed dispersion better ensures continued survival of that plant’s descendants. You still see this in a massive number of wild grains (you see it in other plants, too), and it’s one of the many ways in which a plant can become quite invasive outside its native environment. What shattering does to the farmer is to make it impossible to control the harvest - with seeds flying all over, how do you catch ‘em all?
The second super duper important trait selected for was to breed hard hulls that make threshing difficult out of the wheat. What once was a nightmare in terms of threshing becomes super easy with the naked forms of wheat. What is threshing, you ask? Threshing is separating the grain from the chaff so you’ve got the beginnings of a usable product.
These are, so you know, traits that did genetically modify wild wheat into its earliest cultivated forms. Specifically, if you’re into genetics, stalk shattering ended with mutations to the Br locus. The loss of hulls happens first in the Q locus, which changed the effects of the Tg locus. In the early days, we’re really just talking about emmer and einkorn wheats, but through all the myriad changes to this and that, we ultimately got to common wheat (which comes from durum). Common wheat later changes via selective breeding, ultimately resulting in the modern common wheat that is bred to produce fluffy, fluffy flours. Think WonderBread here.
For those of you not into genetics, this picture will make it a bit easier to understand the above section. Image courtesy of Junhua Peng
From there, wheat spreads, spreads quickly, and becomes ubiquitous in the agricultural world. What happens here is kind of interesting, because you see a lot more creativity on the agricultural front. Emmer and einkorn are basically what happened as a direct result of this early genetic manipulation. Everything else gets a bit weird. Common wheat comes from a cross of durum wheat (Triticum durum) and an unrelated wild grass, Tausch's goatgrass (Triticum tauschii; this has different scientific names, so we’ll just use this one). It is believed that this cross happened in multiple regions independently, which makes sense. If you’ve got durum and you’ve got some wild stuff in your fields, bees don’t much care, do they? So based on genetic testing, different common wheats basically happened in the same way in different places. Isn’t that cool?
One last thing to note about common wheat: common wheat cannot survive in the wild. Cannot. No farmer, no common wheat. Period, end of story. There have actually been tests done on this, and it’s just a bunch of nope nope nope. Basically, it’s the same thing as maize - no farmers, no corn. No farmers, no wheat.
Image courtest of https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/60/6/1537/517393
I could get lost in this all day, but y’all probably care a bit less about the finer details than I do, so we’ll move on.
Other wheats! What’s going on with all these other wheat choices?
Emmer Wheat
Emmer (Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccum and Triticum turgidum conv. durum) is one of the 2 original wheats, and is a hybrid between a wild wheat and another wild grass. It’s got its own wild form, too, and everything. The main difference between the wild and domesticated types is in the shattering. Domestics don’t shatter, wilds do. In general, if you’re buying farro berries, this is what you’ve bought.
Einkorn Wheat
Einkorn (Triticum monococcum for cultivated version) is the other original wheat. Einkorn does better in more temperate, cooler climates than emmer does.
This is einkorn!
Spelt Wheat
Spelt (Triticum spelta) is a really interesting wheat. Sometimes it’s listed as a subspecies of common wheat, but is different enough that it’s also got its own Latin name. Spelt has two different origin stories, interestingly enough: in one instance, goat grass and emmer cross, and in the other, emmer and common wheat. The first version is considered older than common wheat, and the second version happened elsewhere, probably spontaneously. All of this is under dispute, because evidence isn’t quite clear as to whether both versions originated in the same place or not, but generally the two-locations version is the most commonly cited hypothesis.
Durum Wheat
Durum wheat (Triticum durum) is what we can thank for pasta. Oooooooooo pasta! How I love thee…. Durum was selectively bred into its current form from emmer wheat, and is also frequently called semolina. I sometimes like to make citrus and semolina cakes. They’re amaaazing! Evidently there’s also a blue version, which I’d personally never heard of before researching this post. I’m interested!
Khorasan Wheat
Khorasan (Triticum turgidum ssp. turanicum), also called Kamut (trademarked name), is an Egyptian wheat. It’s believed to be hybridized from durum and Polish wheats, though its lineage is still somewhat uncertain. This is, if we’re being fair, a pretty delicious wheat, so we don’t really care too much in my house who its parents were.
Gluten
Now that we’ve done some exploration of a few wheats, let’s talk about what all of them have in common: gluten. If you have an allergy to gluten or celiac disease, you can’t eat any of this. None of it, even if people tell you it’s okay to do so. Some people say those with a wheat allergy can still eat wheats that aren’t common wheat. Talk to your doctor first, because no one likes to see someone risk death based on Dr. Google.
We’re going to talk now a bit about gluten, because I get a lot of questions about it. I’ll try to keep this brief, because I’m sure you’re itching to go bake after reading so much about wheat! Gluten is a protein complex comprised of glutenin and gliadin peptides.
This is what gliadin and glutenin look like together.
For those of you who suffer from gluten intolerance (whether celiac type or non), gliadin is your primary culprit. Basically, what’s going on here is that your body’s got an intolerance or inability to deal with three big types of gliadin: α (alpha), γ (upsilon), and ω (omega), and this causes the autoimmune response for people with CD (celiac disease) that causes so much illness for them. The other kind of gliadin, beta-gliadin, doesn’t appear to be involved in what ails ya, so just the other 3. Scientists used to think that it’s just the gliadin, but it turned out that glutenin can also trigger immunostimulation. I haven’t dug through enough studies at this point to tell you more about that, but it’s appears to be a thing where glutenin may also be toxic to people with gluten intolerance.
This is a gliadin molecule, just in case you wanted to know what it looks like.
Wrapping Up
Because I can feel myself spiraling down the path of TMGI (too much gluten information!), I’m going to leave off with just one more bit of info for y’all:
Gluten in rye is called: secalin.
Gluten in barley is called: hordein.
Gluten in oats is called: contaminated oats. Oats only have gluten if they got it from cross-contamination with wheat, rye, or barley. No, but for real, aside from being called contaminated oats, oats really do contain prolamins (the stuff that is bothering you) called avenins. Whether or not oats are suitable for people who require a gluten free diet pretty much comes down to the cultivar of oats you’re eating. So called pure oats shouldn’t cause a problem, but I personally recommend not messing with oats without physician consent if you have CD. A small percentage of sufferers clinically intolerant to avenins, and you just don’t want that to be you, right? It’s a small enough percentage that we generally say certified GF oats are fine, but for some people they just aren’t so fine. So just be aware of that and talk to your doctor.
