Wheat's long-lost cousin makes a tasty return

by Rick Nichols
Detroit Free press 3/10/1996

Not long ago I started seeing something called "spelt" crop up here and there - in Fresh Fields, as one of Arrowhead Mills baking flours. In some health-food coops, as a brown, whole-grain high-fiber pasta under the Vita-Spelt label.

You can even find sweet, bran-like spelt flakes, "a living legendary Folk Cereal," the box reports, made from a rugged ancient wheat more "sturdy, lustrous and powerfully vital" than those wimpy amber waves of modern grain.

Heated, spelt gives off a pleasing, nutty aroma, lighter and sweeter than some heavier, whole grains. And to the old Pennsylvania winter soup below, it adds grainy texture and an earthy, porcini scent. (Spelt flour can also be substituted in breads calling for whole-wheat flour - or blended, for example, with barley flour in the baking of gingerbread men.)

It was called "German wheat" in colonial days, food historian William Woys Weaver notes, because of its association with the Pennsylvania Dutch (a handful of whom still grow a few acres of the heavy-husked grain, also known once as the "rice of Europe").

But I hadn't heard it mentioned in the litany of newly fashionable ancient grains - quinoa, the chewy mother grain of the Incas; North Africa's sustaining millet, being pitched now as "perfectly in tune with today's modern table"; or amaranth, a non-grain seed actually, cultivated first by cave dwellers.

Well, turns out spelt is the ancient grain du jour - a 9,000 year old non-hybridized, cereal grass full of nutrients, potassium and fiber that a Michigan grain purveyor rediscovered about seven years ago after getting requests from a European broker. "We found 500 pounds of human-grade spelt in Ontario," says Purity Foods co-owner Jeff Kourofsky, "and sent it to a Chicago pasta manufacturer." It worked just fine - and today there are nine whole grain spelt pastas in the company's specialty line, in addition to spelt flours for commercial bakers.

Because it has a tough hull requiring an extra processing step (wheat's hull pops off as it is harvested), and a lower yield than modern wheats, spelt all but vanished by the 1900's. But the hull has its advantages: Chernobyl's fallout affected spelt less than almost any other crop. And it guards a tender kernel full of a soluble gluten that - while long-prized by German pretzel-makers - is also highly digestible in the modern gut, even for the wheat allergic.

It never did quite disappear in Germany, where it survives stoutly in dinkel lagers. In Italy, it's farro and shows up in pizza crusts and cakes.

Is an American comeback in the cards? A major brewer is said to be poking around. And Purity's Kourofsky is bullish: The company is about to introduce, for the supermarket trade, three refined white spelt pastas.

That fiber-filled germ and bran with have to go.
It's a grain-eat-grain world out there.