Comment by comrade1234
11 hours ago
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.