Try this. Ask your healthfood store buyer or owner what the protein content is of the hard red wheat seeds they're selling. You'll almost certainly get a puzzled look and your answer will almost certainly be, "we have Organic and conventional." Demand that the store buyer ask this question of their distributor/wholesaler and then report back to you. If the distributor deigns to answer, the answer will be the same--I sell Organic or conventional hard red wheat. Period. When I got these non-answers I looked further and discovered that hard bread wheats run from about 12 percent protein to about 19 percent and this difference has everything to do with the soil fertility (and to an extent the amount of rainfall during the season), and almost nothing to do with Organic or conventional.
This difference also has everything to do with how your dough behaves and how your bread comes out. And how well your bread nourishes you. Thirteen percent wheat will not make a decent loaf--fourteen percent is generally considered #2 quality and comprises the bulk of cheap bread grain. When you hear in the financial news that a bushel of wheat is selling for a certain price, they mean #2. Bakers compete for higher protein lots and pay far higher prices for more protein.
We prefer our bread about 25% rye, but rye contains no gluten at all. Mix any rye flour into fourteen percent wheat flour and the dough becomes very heavy, won't rise, and after baking, crumbles. So I kept looking for better grain and finally discovered a knowledgeable lady that sold flour mills and who also was a serious baker herself. She had located a source of quality wheat with an assayed protein content and sold it by the 50 pound sack. When I asked her if her wheat was Organic she said it was either sixteen or seventeen percent protein depending on whether you wanted hard red spring wheat or hard white spring wheat. Organic or conventional? I persisted. No, she said. High protein!
So, I said to myself, since protein content is a function of soil fertility and since my body needs protein, I figured I am better off eating the best quality wheat, pesticide/herbicide residues (if there are any) be damned. Think about it! The difference between seventeen percent and fourteen percent protein is about 25 percent. That percentage difference is the key threshold of nutritional deficiency that makes teeth fall out. We can't afford to accept 25% degradations in our nutritional quality in something that we eat every day and that forms the very basis of our dietary.
Please understand here that I am not saying that high protein wheats can't be grown organically. They certainly can. The founder of Great Harvest Bakery performs a valuable service locating and securing high-protein lots of organically grown wheats for his outlets. But often as not Organic products are no more nourishing than those grown with chemicals. Until the buyers at Organic whole food wholesalers get better educated about grain, obtaining one's personal milling stock from them will be a dicey proposition.
Sometimes Organic cereal can be far worse than conventional. To make a cereal Organic is a negative definition; if it hasn't had chemicals, then its Organic. Grain is one of the few foods that will still produce economic yields of low quality seed on extremely infertile soil or when half-smothered in weeds because herbicides weren't used for reasons of ideological purity. Vegetables will hardly produce anything under those conditions; carelessly grown fruits and vegetables are inevitably small, misshapen, unmarketable. But seed cleaning equipment can remove the contamination of weed seeds in cereal grains (at a cost.)
The price the farmer receives for Organic cereal grain is much higher, so it is possible to accept rather low yields or expend more money for cleaning out high levels of weed seeds from the field-run harvest, and still make a good profit. A lousy Organic cereal crop like this might even make a higher profit because the farmer has been spared the expense of fertilization, of rotation, of weed control. I remember once I bought a sack of Organic whole oats that were the smallest, most shriveled, bitterest oats I've ever tried to eat. We ended up throwing out that tiny, light (lacking density) seed in favor of using the "conventional" whole oats that were plump, heavy and sweet.
Wheat is not the only cereal that is damaged by industrial milling. So are oats. Most consumers have never seen whole oats; they look very much like wheat berries. But rolled oats become rancid and stale on the shelf much like wheat flour on the shelf.
Another pitfall about using whole grains is that to be nutritious they must still be fresh enough to sprout vigorously. A seed is a package of food surrounding an embryo. The living embryo is waiting for the right conditions (temperature and moisture) to begin sprouting. Sprouting means the embryo begins eating up stored food and making a plant out of it. All foods are damaged by exposure to oxygen, so to protect the embryo's food supply, the seed is surrounded by a virtually airtight seed coat that permits only enough oxygen to enter for the embryo's respiration (yes, seed breaths slowly). Often the embryo is located at the edge of the seed and has its own air intake port. When the seed coat is removed or damaged, the innards are exposed to air and begin deteriorating rapidly. In the case of oats, especially rapidly, because oats are the only grass-based cereal that contains large quantities of oil--five percent oil, more or less. That's why oats "stick to your ribs." Rolled oats become stale and lose their flavor (and nutritional content) and perhaps become rancid very rapidly. So we make porridge from whole oat groats that we coarsely grind to grits (steel-cut oats) in an electric seed/spice mill just before cooking.
It is not easy to cook oat grits. They take a lot longer than rolled oats and if not done exactly to the recipe I'm about to give you, will almost inevitably stick to the pot badly and may also froth over and mess the stove. Here's how to cook them. Coarsely grind (like corn meal) your whole oats until you have one cup of oat grits. Bring exactly four cups of water (no salt) to a very hard boil at your highest heat. You may add a handful of raisins. Light or turn on a second, small-sized burner on the stove and set it as low as possible. Into the fast boiling water, slowly pour the ground oats, stirring continuously. Take about 30 seconds to pour it all or you'll make clumps. Keep on the high heat until the water again boils vigorously. Suddenly, the mixture will begin rising in the pot and will try to pour all over the stove. This means it is all at boiling temperature again. Quickly move the pot to the low burner; that instantly stops the frothing. Then cover. Let the porridge cook for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice to prevent sticking. Then, keeping it covered, turn off the heat. They can be eaten at this point but I think it is better to let the oats finish soaking on the stove for at least two to four hours. Then reheat in a double boiler, or warm in a microwave.