Many farmers here in Switzerland grow urdinkel - ancient spelt. In the USA most farmers grew it also until around the 1920s but then a new wheat came out that was easier to process. Spelt has thicker hulls and wears down the mill faster so the mills switched to the new wheat and the farmers all had to switch too.
Based on the name I think ur (ancient) Dinkel (spelt) is even older than regular spelt but I'm not sure. All I know is that it makes great crackers but terrible pasta and ok bread but not great.
The straws are longer, which is why they cannot be fertilized with nitrogen. Unlike other spelt varieties, it was never crossed with wheat. It was also not bred for dough stability, which is why it must be baked in a special way, for example, using a water roux. The glutenin-to-gliadin ratio is different, resulting in a highly extensible but weaker gluten network.
It is really different from usual spelt, which was crossed with wheat and has shorter straws.
Edit: maybe this is interesting to some so I'll write a short paragraph about older varieties. There is also Einkorn and Emmer. Einkorn is considered the ultimate ancestor of all modern wheat varieties. It has been grown 10k years ago and is diploid with only two chromosome sets. Then there is Emmer, which is also ancient and appeared shortly after Einkorn. It is tetraploid and yields two corns per spikelet. If you want to eat like an Egyptian Pharao you can eat bread made out of Emmer ;-)
Rye is entirely different. It is very hardy and frost resistant and can't be baked without sourdough because of the amylase.
No, Einkorn is not the ancestor of all cultivated wheat varieties, unless you extend the history of wheat a very long time before domestication, when that becomes somewhat true, because the wild ancestor of emmer wheat was produced by genome duplication from a wild ancestor of einkorn wheat.
At the start of the Neolithic, besides barley, 2 species of wheat were domesticated separately and they evolved through domestication into einkorn wheat and emmer wheat.
Einkorn wheat has always remained a minor crop, while either barley or emmer was the major crop, depending on soil and climate. For instance in the early Ancient Greece barley was the most important, while in the early Roman Republic emmer was the more important. Later, emmer ("far" in Latin) was mostly replaced by durum wheat ("triticum" in Latin), and even later durum wheat was mostly replaced by the hexaploid bread wheat ("siligo" in Latin).
Besides the original emmer and einkorn, other wheat subspecies have appeared many thousands of years later after domestication, either through mutations, like the tetraploid durum wheat (pasta wheat) or through hybridization, like the hexaploid bread wheat (and also the hexaploid spelt wheat).
I was speaking in more casual terms. Botanically you are 100% correct and the way I wrote it implies that modern wheat evolved directly from domesticated Einkorn over time. Which is not correct.
> The straws are longer, which is why they cannot be fertilized with nitrogen.
Why is that? I thought nitrogen is taken in through the roots, then distributed as other ground-based nutrition, regardless of the height.
Because fields of wheat that grew too fast and too tall and fell over after a rain and rotted in the wet field is called a "famine".
Plants do that without lead in soil.
They elongate too quickly so the walls of the straws are weaker if given too much nitrogen at the wrong time. They fall over easily. You want them to grow more slowly with stronger straws.
They would grow even higher with fertilizer and then fall over in a storm. Well it increases the chance or percentage lost to that, it always happens to some degree even with modern varieties.
Which is funny enough, one of the main attributes Borlaug used in the green revolution: crossing Japanese dwarf wheat with modern bread wheat varieties to make the resulting wheat shorter.
The whole idea behind that was that (within reason) the more N you can pump into the crop, the more it will yield. Wheat is essentially an inverted pendulum when ripe, with about 60% of the above-ground biomass perched at the top.
The main thrust of modern crop breeding has been to create crops that you can successfully get to harvest under high-nutrition environments, without it literally falling over or succumbing to disease due to the turgid, fleshy growth. Even then, if you're applying more than maybe 150kgN/ha, you will be relying on plant growth regulators that inhibit auxin/gibberellin response to keep the plant under control.
It isn't nitrogen, it's lead. Lead is needed in regulatory proteins, like calmodulin. Plants grow very quickly without it, then fall over.
I think because they collapse under their own weight?
But what is the actual benefit of Urdinkel? Honestly it sounds a bit like a fad to me, along the lines of "older = better".
They just described the structure of the thing.
In the article it describes the crops as more drought resistant etc.
As in all things commercialized, the tempting easy path weakens in the long term. Mono crops are easier to grow and then the soil gets depleted beyond all recognition. White bread probably outsells whole wheat in America but it is basically devoid of nutritional value.
“Old” means things were scarce because people had to work by hand and oxen. So a failed crop meant a dead family.
White bread is not devoid of nutritional value, because it is the cheapest source of proteins known to mankind. Legumes like lentils, beans or peas have a cost per protein content at least 2 to 2.5 times higher than wheat flour. Chicken meat and plant protein isolates have a cost per protein content at least 4 to 5 times higher than wheat flour.
White bread is also one of the cheapest sources of energy, though depending on the geographical location either maize or rice may be slightly cheaper sources of energy, but which provide much less protein.
Among cereal products, wheat bread has the highest protein content, except for oats, but oats are much more expensive per protein content.
If you eat white bread in preference to any other starchy products, like those based on rice, maize or potatoes, this ensures a higher protein intake per a given calories content, which enables a lower consumption of more expensive sources of proteins, like those based on legumes or on meat.
White bread cannot be the only food that one eats, because other kinds of foods must provide other nutrients, but it can provide at a minimum cost major fractions of the daily intake of proteins and energy.
After experimenting with many different healthy diets, I have settled on a variant that I consider optimal, where wheat bread that I bake myself at home typically provides about a third of my daily protein intake, so its nutritional value is quite important (and the fact that it is very tasty is a welcome bonus).
Does whole wheat bread made from the same grain not have the same protein, or does removing all that fiber, flavour, and micronutrients somehow enhance the protein content and render it less expensive?
The wheat we eat was bred specifically to grow without nutrients.
While the macro discussion is very interesting you are completely leaving out any mention of micros.
So the second two but not the first is technically "wheat" along with Rye ?
Spelt, Einkorn and Emmer are all from the Genus Triticum, which is called wheat. Rye is secale and not called wheat. They are all from the tribe Triticeae. Barley also belongs to the same tribe.
Oat however is from the tribe Aveneae.
I tried both Emmer and Einkorn, but don't remember anything special about the end result. One of the flours/doughs was pretty yellow, but that's about it. It was a while ago and I only tried about a kg of each so my memory is fuzzy.
After the appearance of durum wheat, and then of the bread wheat, the products made from emmer and einkorn (and later also from spelt) have always been more expensive, without having any decisive advantages.
Nonetheless, these minor varieties of wheat have remained important due to their ability to grow in soil or climate conditions where the more productive modern varieties of wheat fail.
So they were frequently used as "backup" crops, for the cases when bad weather or pests destroyed the main wheat crops.
As said in the parent article, they may become again more important where soil has been made worse by modern agricultural practices.
I personally like spelt in bread. It provides a lot of aroma, especially for doughs that are overnight-leavened in low temperature.
I think there is also good evidence that dough in general which is given 24 hrs to rest - like what was traditional pre-industrial - is much better digestible for most people then the additive-loaded dough which only needs hours to minutes, which is a stark time -> quality tradeoff.
Here in the far northeast of Portugal, too. Also, lots of rye, buckwheat, and all sorts of crazy cultivars of other stuff - they grow lettuce here that bolts a meter tall without any loss of flavour, and jersey walking sticks, yellow (on the inside too) watermelons with huge seeds - all sorts - because they still grow the same village/family seed stocks their medieval ancestors did, and a lot of stuff is hyper-adapted to the local climate.
Also larger things like figs and grapes - only after you spend a few years here do you learn that dona olema has one particular fig tree that tastes like melon, and senor rodrigo has a grape vine that makes gigantic (billiard ball sized) ridiculously sweet grapes. This knowledge doesn’t travel to the next valley over, even. Oh, and then you find another vine, the same, climbing a tree in a forest that was a vineyard 70 years ago.
Kinda amazes me how much genetic diversity for crop cultivars there still is, smack under our noses, across Europe.
Gigantic grapes sound awesome, so did a quick check. Assuming 5–6 cm in diameter, this appears to far exceed the size of any known grape variety.
Funny that I grew up in rural north portugal and never heard of any of this bs
Dunno what to tell you man, apart from maybe it depends on just how rural. Where we are, NE trás os montes, everywhere was a really long way from everywhere until the 20th century, as the terrain is a nightmare of deep river valleys and few bridges. Like, from our village, you can see the nearest village - it’s only 3km as the crow flies - but it’s 30km and 40 minutes by paved road. 10km by heavily worn track and a medieval bridge.
Funny, I was just there last week. Without getting to know locals all I saw was olive trees and almond trees and some grapes and oranges, many hectares of abandoned farms, and wonderful villages built on the seeming near-vertical sides of hills with small gardens with lots of cabbages (it was October, so that tends to be what's left). I'm sure lots was hidden from my passing eyes.
The roads were, well, challenging. We followed Google Maps directions to one destination, but it's not very good. It led us through a medieval town made of stone where the roads were just a centimetre or so wider than our tiny subcompact rental car and then up a steep hill from which we could actually see our destination on the other side of the village. After letting the scent of overheated clutch and burning transmission oil dissipate, we did a 3-point turn with a sheer drop on either side and no guardrails and then back through the village, hoping the breaks were good and holding our breaths passing between the houses. Locals just stared and pointed the right direction without saying a word (I guess we were not the first strangers to be misled by the Googs). Anyways the roads are harrowing but make for great stories.
Also, we found an old abandoned quinta for sale that we'd love to buy (even has paleolithic rock art on the property) but they're asking 3.5 million euros, which is about 3.5 million euros more than I have for such things.
So I'm not surprised if there are local agricultural treasures. Isn't that the part of Portugal where they speak the country's official second language Mirandese?
Terrible pasta? I solely buy spelt (dinkel) pasta of I can choose.
Maybe you mean it gets more sticky if you cook it too long? But al dente I think it's amazing. It has a nutty taste that works very well with tomatoes if you ask me.
Dinkelpasta..is...a..acquired taste.. lol
Maybe you had full grain pasta? That is indeed... questionable, doesn't matter if spelt or wheat.
raw spelt is fantastic in beer. Malted spelt is indistinguishable.