bake - January 2015 - 38

Heirloom
Wheat Flour
Acclaimed artisan bread bakery WheatFields is part of a
growing movement of retail bakeries to use bread ﬂour milled
from heirloom wheat in some breads, including Country
French, Multigrain, Pain de Campagne, Steel-cut Oat, Walnut
Sage, and 100% Whole Wheat. This development plays heavily
into the current hyper-local sourcing trend that is sweeping
America's retail food industry.
The Lawrence, Kansas, bakery buys heirloom ﬂour from
Heritage Grain and Seed Company in Lawrence. The heirloom variety is Turkey hard red winter wheat grown by Bryce
Stephens in Decatur County, Kansas, and milled by Heartland

Noted Kansas bakery WheatFields is promoting its use of local heirloom

Mill in Marienthal, Kansas.

wheat in artisan breads such as Steel-cut Oat and Walnut Sage.

"We love its baking qualities and the ﬂavor of the bread we

The farmers and the wheat thrived, as the variety proved well-

make with it. While we have no illusions of Turkey dominating

adapted to the soils and the hot summers and cold winters of

the high plains again, we are proud to be playing a part in

the Kansas plains.

its survival as a living crop," WheatFields Bakery co-founder
Thom Leonard explains.

In the mid-1880s, grainsman Bernard Warkentin imported
some 10,000 bushels of Turkey seed from the Ukraine, the

Turkey variety hard red winter wheat was introduced to

ﬁrst commercially available to the general public. The 10,000

Kansas in1873. Mennonite immigrants from Crimea in the

bushels (600,000 pounds) would plant some 150 square miles

Ukraine, ﬂeeing forced military service from Russia, smuggled

(10,000 acres). By the beginning of the 20th century, hard

in the seeds sewn into the inside of their coats.

red winter wheat, virtually all of it "Turkey," was planted on
some ﬁve million acres in Kansas alone. In the meantime, it had

While no statistics were kept of the actual amount of seed

become the primary wheat variety throughout the plains from

carried in this earliest introduction, estimates range from as

the Texas panhandle to South Dakota.

little as 360 pounds (one peck per each of 24 families) to as
much as 36,000 pounds (one bushel per each of the 600

Today hard red winter wheat is planted to twice the acreage

families). This is enough to plant 6 to 600 acres.

in Kansas than a century ago, some ten million acres. While
half the genes in the modern wheat crop have their origin in

The Mennonite history relates that this seed was carefully

the old Turkey wheat, only a hundred acres of actual Turkey

hand selected for the soundest kernels and packed in the

were planted for harvest in the summer of 2009, on the same

coats and luggage of the immigrants on their long journey

northwest Kansas farm that is the source of the heirloom ﬂour

to new farms in a new and distant land. These farm families

in WheatFields' bread. In the ﬁeld, Turkey is taller than its

also carried with them the agricultural knowledge and skills

modern semi-dwarf descendents. It yields less wheat per acre,

necessary for this crop to be successful in Kansas, where the

but does retain its cold and drought hardiness and its resis-

climate and soils were much like in their lands in the Ukraine.

tance to the most common wheat diseases. JOHN U N REIN

38 < JAN 2015 | bakemag.com

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