Wheat

Today, there are six classes of wheat cultivated, within which there are some thirty thousand varieties. (There is an immense amount of acreage planted to wheat in North America—almost 54 million acres in 2010—and it would be easy to conclude that wheat as we know it has always grown on the continent, but in fact wheat is not indigenous to North America, and was originally brought by farm immigrants from Europe.) The six classes of wheat are hard red winter, hard red spring, hard white winter, durum, soft white winter, and soft white spring. It is the first four that are of primary interest to the bread baker (the soft wheats have a lower proportion of protein and a higher proportion of starch than the hard wheats, and are more applicable to the production of pastries and other baked goods that don’t require a highly developed gluten structure). For our discussion, we will focus on the first four classes of wheat.