Starting in the fall of 2008, four of our breads (listed below) use a flour milled from heirloom wheat. Our heirloom flour is supplied by the Heritage Grain and Seed Company in Lawrence, Kansas, from “Turkey” variety hard red winter wheat, grown by Bryce Stephens in Decatur County, Kansas, and milled by Heartland Mill, in Marienthal, Kansas. In the fall of 2009, Turkey wheat was boarded onto Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. Read more about that here.
“Turkey” variety hard red winter wheat was introduced to Kansas in1873, carried by Mennonite immigrants from Crimea in the Ukraine, fleeing Russian forced military service. While no statistics were kept of the actual amount of seed carried in this earliest introduction, estimates based on vernacular history range from as 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 families). This is enough to plant 6 to 600 acres.The Mennonite history relates that this seed was carefully hand selected for the soundest kernels and packed in the luggage of the immigrants on their long journey to new farms in a new and distant land. These farm families gave us more than seed: they also carried with them the agricultural knowledge and skills necessary for this crop to be successful in Kansas, where the climate and soils were much like in their lands in the Ukraine.
The farmers and the wheat thrived – the variety proved well-adapted to the soils and the hot summers and cold winters of the Kansas plains.
In the mid-1880s, grainsman Bernard Warkentin imported some 10,000 bushels of “Turkey” seed from the Ukraine, the first commercially available to the general public. That 10,000 bushels (600,000 pounds) would plant some 150 square miles (10,000 acres). By the beginning of the twentieth century, hard red winter wheat, virtually all of it “Turkey,” was planted on some five million acres in Kansas alone. In the meantime, it had become the primary wheat variety throughout the plains from the Texas panhandle to South Dakota. Without “Turkey” wheat there would be no “Breadbasket.”
Today hard red winter wheat is planted to twice the acreage in Kansas than a century ago, some ten million acres. While half the genes in the modern wheat crop have their origin in the old “Turkey” wheat, only a hundred acres of actual “Turkey” were planted for harvest in the summer of 2009, on the same northwest Kansas farm that is the source of the heirloom flour in our bread.
In the field, Turkey is taller than its modern semi-dwarf descendents. It yields less wheat per acre, but does retain its cold and drought hardiness and its resistance to the most common wheat diseases. We love its baking qualities and the flavor of the bread we make with it. While we have no illusions of “Turkey” dominating the high plains again, we are proud to be playing a part in its survival as a living crop.
You can find Turkey wheat in the following of our breads at the percentages listed.
Pain au Levain: 90%
Olive bread: 82%
Miche: 70%
Crossett Hill Round/Batard: 58%
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