We feel what happens to food prices and our lifestyle when conflict broke out in the Ukraine and Russia. So much of our daily lives are interdependent on the global village that countries, and people, know they need to start thinking more locally to support food traditions and the culture they love. On one side of the spectrum you have China building 8-story vertical pork farms, and on the other, thankfully you have individuals leading a new kind of sanity, like Hagay Ben-Yehuda. He is making bread by hand using ancient grains.
The baker from Kibbutz Einat, just outside of Tel Aviv and who works with the Volcani Institute, an agricultural research center, has become famous for his sourdough bread (follow our recipe from our in-house baker Miriam) made from locally-grown ancient wheat.
While the emmer wheat was native to the Levantine area, and helped usher in this region as the breadbasket of civilization, in recent decades all of Israel’s wheat, except for religious customs, is typically imported from America.
Funny, in the religious Jewish culture that devotes so much of its prayers and blessings to bread that these “blessings” have been brought from far and away lands, farmed on pesticide-intense mono-culture farms, and brought on ships.
But that’s changing thanks to a slew of bakers in Israel and no doubt the world, bringing on their own change loaf by loaf. But at a cost. Because local farming and hand baking doesn’t come cheap in one of the most expensive countries in the world. While the cost for fancy sourdough bread in Israel is rather high, about $9 or $10, customers are willing to pay for it as a commodity they can’t live without.
Ben Yehuda says that as a fifth generation baker “bread is an inseparable part of my family, of my memories and in general of who I am.”
Emmer wheat is one of the wheat he uses. It’s known as the “mother of wheat”, as it is the wheat used for bread in Biblical times and was then rediscovered growing wild near Mount Hermon, on the borders with Syria and Lebanon, by the 1940s.
Other strains of ancient wheat from the region include jaljuli, hourani, abu fashi and dubiya samra – all grown locally for millennia in the Levantine area, but by the 1960s already replaced by imported common wheat which is cheaper and for some easier to digest, but much less good for the body.
Making a few hundred loaves a day, mostly going to Tel Aviv Ben Yehuda says he wants people to have the right memories from childhood, and does it as a labor of love. He says: “For the past for years I have been sowing ancient wheat varieties that were once grown here in the land of Israel in order to bring back the flavors and textures that originally belonged to this land, thus producing bread and local culture in the full sense of the word.
