How climate change could be affecting flour – and bakeries

A disaster at a Chicago bakery reveals how unusually dry weather can affect the quality of an essential ingredient.

bread
Baked bread. J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press
bread
Baked bread. J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press

How climate change could be affecting flour – and bakeries

A disaster at a Chicago bakery reveals how unusually dry weather can affect the quality of an essential ingredient.

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A Chicago bakery had to throw away more than 2,000 croissants because an unusual dry season had changed the flour the bakers were using. In this conversation with reporter Aimee Levitt, we hear how climate change is making its way into bakeries.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MELBA LARA, HOST: A Chicago bakery had to throw away more than 2,000 croissants, not because of an infestation or disease outbreak, but because of an unusually dry season that has changed the flour the bakery was using. Aimee Levitt reported on this incident for Eater Chicago and about how climate change is making its way into bakeries. She joins us now to talk more about this. Amy, welcome.

AIMEE LEVITT: Thank you.

LARA: So this bakery that I mentioned, Aya Pastry in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, tell us more about what happened to them.

LEVITT: Well, they were making their wholesale order of croissants last summer. And the dough started behaving very strangely, when you make croissants, you have to get the dough to encase a butter block. So it has to be very flexible. But in this case, the dough was cracking so the butter was leaking out which kind of fried the pastry, so it was hard instead of flaky and not what you want in a croissant.

LARA: Connect the dots for us. What did they find was the cause of those changes?

LEVITT: They found out that the flower was unusually dry. Aya Fukai is the owner of Aya Pastry. I called up the miller and he told them that it was the driest flower he’d ever seen.

LARA: Amy, you’ve reported that most of our country’s wheat is grown in the Great Plains and - tell us how climate is kind of changing that region, and how is it affecting local crops?

LEVITT: Well, winter and spring is getting wetter and warmer, and the summers are getting hotter and drier. Which means that the growing season it’s getting shorter, and then the area where you can grow the wheat where it’s viable, it’s being pushed northward. So there is less space to grow the wheat.

LARA: And for your story, you actually talk to an expert at Washington State University’s bread lab, what a wonderful place to work. And they said there’s a lot more change actually to come. What did he say?

LEVITT: He said that the chaos is here to stay and that bakers have to start paying closer attention to what’s going on with their flour. Central Milling, where Aya got her flour, they provide spec sheets. So it describes all the properties of the flour with numbers and hard data and stuff like that.

LARA: And tell us a little bit more specifically about the bakers that you talk to how are they adjusting? How are they dealing with all these fluctuations in this really critical basic element flour?

LEVITT: It’s very hard. Aya said that her entire staff, they just went through the whole process of how they make croissants. They spent a week doing it like looking at every single little step before they finally pinpointed what was wrong. And that you figured out that they had to add more water, and then they ended up using a lower gluten flour so it’d be easier to work with. Another baker I talk to is Greg Way of Public and Quality Bread, also in West Town. And he keeps a spreadsheet of his spec sheets. And he said that the water content in flour has been going down steadily in like the past seven or eight years, almost 10%. So that is like a huge deal.

LARA: I know that a lot of people were baking their own bread during the pandemic early on. And you know, home bakers are listening to this going wait a minute, if I like to bake bread and pastries at home, what am I going to notice changing here? Is there anything we need to worry about if we’re baking at home?

LEVITT: Not so much. I mean, like in the broad sense, yes, climate change is terrible. And you’re going to have to worry but when you bake bread at home, you generally add water and flour you adjust as you go. The problem with making croissants is that it’s so precise, you cannot add water afterwards because it will ruin the dough. But when you’re making bread at home, you probably won’t notice. You’re also making a far smaller quantity than 240 croissants at once.

LARA: Writer Amy Levitt reported on climate change and bakeries for Eater Chicago. Amy, thanks for joining us it was great to talk to you.

LEVITT: Thank you for having me.


See ongoing stories from WBEZ and the Local Media Association, and listen to interviews with experts about climate change topics in our region.