It's something that never gets old to me.

Every year it's like a whole new set of gifts to unwrap.

In this episode I was excited to learn about wheat for flavor, and wheat that could be grown in a way that was more sustainable than the way that I traditionally had thought of wheat being grown.

My go-to favorite food is pasta.

I've always thought, "How can the pasta fit into an episode?"

And usually, the pasta takes too much of the limelight.

The making of the pasta will overshadow the other part of the recipe.

So all of a sudden, we have an episode about wheat.

It can be all about the pasta.

I'm Maggie Keith and I'm the farmer.

And I'm Lindsey McClave and I'm the foodie.

And this is.

The Farmer.

& The Foodie.

Funding for this program is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions.

█ █ █ █ My farm was growing wheat for 20 years.

And I kind of had this toxic view of wheat because it depleted the soil, and we use a lot of chemicals, and it definitely did not set me up for success when I was going to have really fertile soil.

But then, when we started to talk about the flavor of wheat and the innovative ways we can grow wheat that is better for the soil, better for the consumer, better for baking bread and muffins and cakes in Kentucky, I started to adapt and want to learn more about wheat.

█ █ █ █ We're on Spindletop Farm, sometimes we call it North Farm.

And we're surrounded by wheat plots.

So I'm a wheat breeder at the University of Kentucky.

Right behind us we have a disease nursery.

You can maybe see that there's a bunch of risers with little nozzles attached to them, that they come on at a certain time of day.

We're actually trying to create a disease epidemic in there, so we can screen for resistance.

So that's one of the kinds of things we do here.

Wheat, I feel like, is one of those things where like a traditional end-user thinks that when they look out at wheat fields all over farms, that's wheat that we're eating.

Can you tell us the difference between like the wheat that's grown for consumers and then the conventional wheat that's grown for the conventional market?

For many years of the time that I've spent here, the effort was directed toward breeding for the commodity market.

As we were discussing earlier, wheat is a widely traded and sold commodity.

In 2013, a local baker, Jim Betts from Bluegrass Baking, asked me, "Can I possibly source my bread wheat locally from locally grown wheat?"

And I said, "I don't know.

I think we probably can make that happen.

It'll take us a while to figure it out."

And so, really, since then we've been working on that question, locally grown, locally milled, locally baked, brewed, or distilled.

Post-COVID, everybody saw the fragility of the supply chains, right?

And so there's huge interest in trying to make local supply chains and value chains work.

So from a baking perspective and flavor, where do you even begin?

I look out at these beautiful square plots.

It's gorgeous out here.

But do you start with, "Well, we know this one strain of wheat has good flavor for bread, so we're gonna start there," how does that process even begin?

In the commodity market, varieties are blended.

And since that's been the prevalent way of doing business for all these years, we really didn't have a clue about varietal differences in flavor.

And so in 2017, we went to a grain gathering at the Breadlab in the Skagit Valley, north of Seattle.

And I had an old friend there, Steve Jones, and we talked about flavor.

And he said, "Look in your germplasm, look in the material, the soft red winter wheat that's adapted to Kentucky, and you'll find the flavor variance."

And so that's what we started doing in Bob Perry's lab that year.

And we just published a paper last year in which we showed that flavor is a heritable trait, meaning that we can breed for it.

So that was a huge finding for us.

We tasted a lot of pretty bad-tasting wheat in those years, for sure.

But we found some that tasted really good, too.

We're excited, and we found that, you know, it has the flavor, it has the dough functionality, meaning that it can stand up and make a high-loaf volume loaf of bread, make a decent baguette.

For the baker, it's an investment of time.

We're going to a single variety.

It's not as buffered against environmental issues, for example, as a blend of varieties would be.

The baker might come back to me and say, "Look, last year this was great, and this year not so good.

We're really having problems.

"And that's something that we've been working with them on, because they're very detail oriented.

You know, they took a little more time with fermentation.

They used a little less leaven.

The hydration was higher and so they didn't have to use as much water, stuff like that.

But all of that is like experimentation, really, on their part.

For me as a scientist, that's kind of fun because that's what we do, you know, we experiment, and we try new things.

For them, it's fun if it works, you know?

So we're still kind of feeling our way through that.

And how did we get here?

How did we get to a point where, like, there are varieties of wheat that don't taste that good?

Like, I'm imagining back in the day there were more people growing their own wheat, making their own bread, and they had those seeds passed down for generations.

And then, what happened between then and now?

I mean, one school of thought is that modern plant breeders, like myself, have selected for high yield and disease resistance, and in the process, the genes that confer good flavor have sort of been lost.

But I think another thing that really stands out in my mind is that having gone to tons of milling and baking quality meetings over the year, no one has ever mentioned flavor.

Okay?

And the reason is that the bakers do their magic, okay?

The flavor comes from ingredients other than the wheat.

No one has looked extensively at flavor in wheat.

Body of literature is quite small.

So it's a lot of fun in that sense to really try and find something that tastes awesome.

We grow soft red winter wheat in Kentucky.

That's the wheat that is used for biscuits, pancakes, cookies, cakes, typically not bread, because it doesn't have what we call real strong gluten, that matrix of proteins that keeps a loaf at a high volume.

I thought, "Okay, we find some high-protein wheats in amongst our breeding lines, let's see if we have some strong gluten ones."

And we found that, yeah.

So that's been super exciting.

█ █ █ █ I could not have dreamt for it to come together in a more really profound and interesting way than getting to meet Dr. Van Sanford as well as Chef Bob and learn about what they're doing with the Wheat Project at UK and how that pertains to the kitchen and how flavor brings it all together.

Well, this is the culinary lab for the Department of Dietetics and Human Nutrition.

This is where I've been teaching for the last 20 years.

And the thing I love about Dave's research with wheat is what he looks for first is taste and flavor.

So when he brings his wheat samples in with his grad students, they come into my lab here, we mill the flour, then we make bread or flatbreads and taste it first to try and find a wheat that tastes good.

Once we find one that tastes good, then he'll work on the agronomic properties.

Can the farmers grow it profitably?

Can we get it milled?

But the first step is the most fun.

That's the milling and baking.

What I use in my class is actually a Meadows mill.

This mill will do 100 pounds an hour.

And it's a stone mill.

It's got two stones in it.

One stays still, the other rotates.

You adjust the width of the stones with the front control.

You adjust how fast the wheat goes through it with this little control here, and it's got one motor.

It's a very simple mill.

And what we have is soft red winter wheat from the [Howcombe] Farm in Chaco, Kentucky.

Okay.

And you can see it's just hard little kernels.

You put the wheat in the hopper and turn it on.

[machine whirring] So then once it's ground, it comes in here.

Oh, my gosh.

And you can feel it.

It's nice and soft.

It's really soft.

I love how warm it is.

And you can see the brown specks.

Yes, you can see that.

That's the bran.

Oh, my gosh.

The thing about wheat is wheats have a lot of flavor, but the flavors dissipate very quickly.

The way I teach students is when you're buying flour in the grocery, you never think about how it tastes, you always think about the functionality.

This wheat has tons of flavor.

And we're gonna show you when we bake some stuff with it.

It's really, really fun.

█ █ █ █ All right, let's make some dough.

Get a big scoop.

Big scoop, all right.

[laughter] What is 500 grams?

█ █ █ █ Easy.

Twenty grams of salt, which is right there.

Go around, 20 grams.

Easy.

Oop.

[laughter] Oh, well.

[laughs] This is a neat trick I teach all the students.

So you need lukewarm water for this if you're gonna use it fast.

If you're gonna put your dough in the fridge overnight, you use cold water.

But the way you tell the water's the right temperature is by letting it run over the back of your hand.

If it feels like a shower that you would get into, not a hot shower but just a lukewarm shower, you're good.

A tablespoon of yeast in the water.

Do the yeast first.

And then stir it around.

Really stir it up, and pour your yeast and water in.

All right.

So now we've got everything in here.

We're gonna let this mix until we get a shaggy dough and it picks up all the flour.

And then we're gonna turn it off and wait 15 minutes.

That's called the autolyse, that lets the flour start to hydrate.

Then we'll come back and turn it back on and let it knead the dough.

And then we let it rest for an hour, and we're ready to use it.

All right, so it's been 15 minutes.

We've given the flour a chance to hydrate.

So now we're gonna turn the mixer back on.

And you'll know when it's ready, when it starts to climb the dough hook.

So we're gonna turn it back on.

But you can already see it's stronger.

Yes.

Like than it was, now that it's set.

It's picked up all of that flour and it'll start to get smoother.

It'll never get perfectly smooth because we have whole wheat in there.

It's always gonna be a little bit coarser.

Let's say we're about there.

So now if you want to take that bowl and you want to do a big swirl of olive oil around it.

That's good.

Let me get this out.

It is a sticky dough.

I love the stretch in it.

Me too.

Fold it under itself.

Okay, so not knead it around, just kind of.

Right, just fold it under.

You get a nice smooth top.

Put it upside down into the oil.

Now flip it back over.

Now just make sure it's got oil around it and tuck it underneath.

And then we're gonna cover this in plastic wrap.

Put it in a warm spot and let it proof for about an hour.

█ █ █ █ So here is our gorgeous dough.

Oh my gosh, I love it.

So you need to punch it down.

Okay, just right in the middle?

Just right in the middle, just punch it down.

[laughs] You see it deflating.

Now, ball that up like you did, just to get it round.

Now, flatten it.

Use your fingers first.

Just start spreading it out.

█ █ █ █ Push and push and push.

Okay, let's see.

Wow.

[laughs] Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

All right, now you can stretch it out.

Oh!

You got to spin it when you throw it.

[laughs] █ █ █ █ Yum.

It's got a little crunch on the bottom because we used it right on the stone.

Oh, my goodness.

All right.

Let me get this focaccia.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my, this is just like fall apart.

Oh, smells so good.

I love it.

Bob, this has been such a treat.

Thank you so much.

What a feast.

And I cannot wait to take all that you've taught us back to my kitchen.

And the wheat being from the fields, this is great.

Thank you so much.

You're very welcome.

It's great having you all.

█ █ █ █ Lindsey, we're having an epic wheat adventure.

[laughs] I have known you as the pasta queen for a while now.

[laughs] I've wanted to try your pasta.

I haven't, so this is my first experience.

[laughs] And what better way to try it than with some locally grown wheat.

Oh, my gosh, it has been so much fun to play with pasta making with this true whole wheat flour.

And you can really see, as we got to see there, I mean, it's very soft, but you can see the flex of, I guess, the bran that's in there.

Yeah, look at the bran in there.

Yeah, it's really lovely.

Pasta queen is a very generous mantle.

[laughs] The stoke on me, but I do love making pasta so much.

You do.

It's my favorite thing.

I love the magic of just taking flour and eggs and it becoming this amazing dough, turning it out into noodles.

It's just so much fun.

And I thought we could do a ravioli and fill it with ricotta that's mixed with this just fun spring chimichurri.

I just think it brings all the flavors that we're seeing right now in the garden into our pasta.

A good ratio to keep in mind is 100 grams of wheat or flour to every one person or one egg.

And you just put it in a bowl, make a little well, and crack the eggs right into the middle.

[laughs] Now I feel like there's probably, you know, an Italian grandmother somewhere who's like, you know, "Do it on your table."

I started making it in a bowl just to make it a little bit less messy.

Yeah, definitely.

You know, instead of getting flour everywhere, it kind of keeps it all together.

And then just a nice pinch of salt in there.

What you do, you just kind of start whisking the eggs and like slowly bring the flour into it.

And not super slow, but you just kind of like make the well a little bit bigger.

Yeah.

And it starts to come together.

So speaking of this point, this is about where it starts to look like this.

Okay And I'll give you a show and then you go.

I like to just sort of start.

It's going to be pretty sticky and wet, but it will come together.

I just kind of push it down and like kind of try to bring it together into a ball until it starts to be a little bit less dry, if that makes sense.

So if you want to kind of - and I mean, it's pretty sticky, but it will eventually be a little bit less.

Yeah So, fantastic.

This is so fun.

Hands-on cooking is like.

I know, isn't it?

..my favorite activity.

And really, it comes together super quick.

All right.

That looks really good to me.

You don't want to, yeah, like we said, over flour.

But to me, this feels really nice.

It's soft.

It's malleable.

It's still slightly sticky.

I think that's going to mean we'll have a tender pasta.

To me, this will probably make us about 20 ravioli.

So it's a nice amount.

I'll eat my 10.

[laughs] [laughs] Yeah.

Well, have no problem putting those away.

But what I'm going to do is just we'll wrap this so it doesn't dry out.

Keeps it nice and soft.

And about 20 minutes from now, we'll roll it out and start making our ravioli.

So this is just a spring chimichurri is what I like to call it.

And it's sort of just a celebration of all the things in the garden right now, including some garlic scapes, a little bit of this spring onion.

We've got some parsley, cilantro, some dill.

And I like it on steaks, on eggs, mixed in all sorts of things, including our ravioli filling.

We're going to add some of your beautiful red pepper flakes in there.

We're going to put - this is about two tablespoons of red wine vinegar.

We'll do a nice, healthy squeeze of the lemon juice.

You want to do a just good, healthy pinch of salt?

Healthy pinch?

[laughs] This is just one of those dump it, puree it.

Make sure you like it.

That's one of my favorite ways.

I like to start by just pureeing it up so they get nice and chopped.

And then, we'll turn on the blade.

The biggest challenge for me with chimichurri is getting the acid right.

I love this texture, actually.

You taste and tell me what you think.

Perfect.

Good?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Fantastic.

All right.

Well, let's spoon this out and get to rolling and filling our pasta.

Yay.

Yay.

This is for two people.

So we're gonna cut it in half and work with one piece at a time.

So there's a slight stickiness to this.

So we're gonna just use a little bit of flour, like I said.

But to start, we want to just kind of flatten it out so it will go through our pasta roller.

A rolling pin will work, and you will just keep working at it until it gets as thin.

Ideally, they say it's like as thin so you could see your fingers through it.

We're going to start and we're on level one.

And we're just going to put our dough through.

And after that first roll through, I like to fold it over again, like plate it a little bit.

Then, we're just going to roll through each setting.

█ █ █ █ And certainly, you could cut it and, you know, at this point and do smaller sections, but I don't know.

I bet you're a professional.

I just like to keep it fun.

So you can do this a few different ways.

We've got this cute little cookie cutter.

There's certainly professional pasta cutters.

Turn a cup upside down and cut around it.

I love, like you said, Maggie, you can really see all of the flecks of the nutrients of the wheat in here.

I mean, it is pure, unfiltered, unbleached wheat.

Yeah.

It started off as this beautiful art, and we're going back to that with the flavor and with valuing how we're growing this on the farm.

Yeah, it's really.

I mean, these were wheat berries.

I know.

Just like not long ago.

I love it.

We've got about a little over a cup of ricotta here.

So let's do two happy spoonfuls.

What we're going to do.

We talked about you really don't want to overfill.

So just like a tiny dollop.

So there's plenty of edge here to work with.

I just take my finger and I dip it in the water.

I like to brush the whole top with a little water and then also just go around the edge here.

Nice.

Then we're going to just put this right on top.

It's so cute.

And I first start by just like pushing the sides down together.

And you also want to just push it down so it's nice and sealed.

But you squeeze any air that might be in there out.

So you want just that nice little pocket.

It's like the perfect pillow.

I know.

Isn't that so cute?

█ █ █ █ It really is just like paper-thin.

There are many moments in the kitchen that remind me a lot of farming.

And this is very similar to like making soil blocks before you're starting your seeds in the spring.

Or when you're planting and you're making all the little holes before you transplant your tomato plants.

Like, this kind of work just brings me a lot of peace and joy.

So now I'm happy to have a rainy day activity inside.

[laughs] You're just going to bring a large pot of water to a boil.

Add a really nice heavy pinch of salt.

And then, carefully place your ravioli into the boiling water.

They won't take but one to two minutes tops to cook up.

I look for them sort of to rise to the top of the water.

Then you'll know that they're pretty much there.

Once the ravioli are cooked, use a slotted spoon and carefully transfer them directly into your pan of sauce.

I love just my go-to marinara sauce for this.

Let it warm in the marinara sauce for one to two minutes before you transfer to your serving bowl.

And then garnish with the basil, the parmesan, and dig right in.

All right, should we each try one?

Yeah.

All right, cheers.

Cheers.

Mm.

Mm.

Honestly, it's that filling.

I know.

Wow.

It is really good.

Yeah, I really like -- you can see it in there.

It's not overwhelming.

Dr. Van Sanford and Chef Bob really got me thinking about tasting the wheat.

I hadn't really thought about how flour tastes.

I just thought of that as sort of the baseline.

And now it's just really opened my eyes to all the possibilities and really how wheat should taste.

I really like playing with pasta, and one of the most fun ways to do that is to add vegetables to it.

So let's make a spinach pasta, and we're gonna hand cut it into pappardelle noodles, a little bit less time consuming than making ravioli and equally as delicious.

Yes.

Okay.

So we have our spinach here.

And all we've done is about a half pound of spinach.

We just gave it a really quick boil, like 30 seconds.

And then we took it straight from the boiling water into an ice bath.

It just stops the cooking, preserves that gorgeous green color.

But we do want to make sure that there's not a lot of extra water in here.

So you can see there still is, we squeezed it, but you can always get a little more out.

So the easiest thing to do is just put your spinach into a dish towel and then you're just gonna squeeze.

We're just gonna put it into our blender.

So it will infuse with our eggs.

So before we just had eggs and flour, and now we're having eggs, spinach and flour.

So we're just gonna add another healthy pinch of salt.

Bring this together.

[blender whirring] Perfect.

[laughs] Now it's the same thing as we did before.

We're going to do 100 grams of flour per person.

This does have more liquid, obviously, so we might need to add a little more flour as we go.

But that's when we're going to observe.

And then we're just gonna mix it together, knead it as we did before, and roll it out into our sheets.

█ █ █ █ Certainly, you can have a lot of fun here once you roll it out.

You can have like different pasta cutters, but we're gonna do a hand-cut pappardelle noodle.

All right, we have one more hunk of spinach pasta to process.

Yeah, let's do it.

You go for it, farm girl.

Okay.

█ █ █ █ Gosh.

How do you catch the end?

You're good.

I know.

So we're gonna cut this into thirds.

And we're definitely gonna do more flour.

This is super delicate, which is not a bad thing, just something to be mindful of.

So I'm gonna take my pasta sheet and I'm gonna fold it like this.

I'm gonna fold it again.

And then I'm gonna turn it like this.

I'm gonna take my knife and I'm just going to cut noodles.

Foldings.

Yeah.

And you want to be -- the idea here is to prevent the sticking, which is a little tricky.

But when you're done, you undo it and you get these lovely noodles.

I just think this is a really fun way to sort of like, well, first off, just have really lovely fresh whole ingredients, and then also like kind of level up your pasta game.

You know what I mean?

Oh, my gosh, my family would be very pleased if I started feeding them fresh pasta for dinner.

There you go, with spinach in it.

Yes.

We're gonna use that same water we used to boil the spinach.

Maybe a minute total, minute and a half, and then we're gonna take the pasta directly into our simple sauce, which is just gonna be some olive oil, some lemon zest, your red pepper flakes, maybe some green garlic tossed in.

So it's just really nice infused oil.

Add a little bit of the pasta water just to kind of brighten things up.

And then, yeah, we'll get to tasting.

Okay, all right.

█ █ █ █ Okay, our spinach pasta is ready.

And I think we should throw a little bit of parm on there.

And then also, just continue this yumminess with just a nice spritz of fresh lemon juice, and a little kick from your red pepper flakes won't hurt, I don't think.

No, this will be perfect.

All right.

Oh, yeah, should we do it at the same time?

Whoo.

[laughs] I think garnishes are so important and they just add such an extra little bit of yumminess.

So, that said, bon appetit.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Oh, my gosh.

It's delicious.

I mean, I'll share a bowl of pasta with you any day.

[laughs] Me too.

You can really taste that spinach in there.

I know, right?

I wasn't expecting that.

I know.

Thankful for our farmers for this experience and to create c wheat that will grow well here and taste so good.

Yeah, I hope people really glom on to this wheat movement.

I mean, we have some major potential for bringing wheat back to flavor.

█ █ █ █ Funding for this program is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions.