In the United States, companies touting its antioxidant powers blend the fruit into Snapple red tea; Red Brick Pizza's frantically trendy multigrain, whole-wheat artisan crust; and everything from dietary supplements to beauty products.
Once a tour guide in Africa, Annette Gibbons has dovetailed this experience with her considerable knowledge of food and devised short journeys of gluttonous discovery - meats, fish, cheese, butter, organic wheat and flour from artisan producers.
There's the artisan bread movement with bakers kneading not just wheat but all manner of grains to produce a denser product that's eaten more slowly (I think of my husband's weekly two-day ritual to bake one large sour and aromatic whole-grain rye bread studded with barley; it lasts a week).
Practically anyone can find something at Artisan, whether they need dairy-free, gluten-free, wheat-free, salt-free, yeast-free, kosher, vegetarian or blood-group-compatible bread.
Pasta was prepared from the ancient and modern durum wheat by Pastificio Artigiano Fabbri s.a.s., an artisan pasta-maker, whereas bread, biscuits and crackers were made from the ancient and modern soft wheat by the artisan enterprise of Panificio Menchetti Pietro di Santi e Figli s.n.c.n.c
The production process involves wheat grinding and baking; both processing stages can occur in small scale (artisan) or large scale (industrial) plants.
Rather than use high-gluten hard wheat flour (containing up to 14percentt protein), which is standard in American bread, artisan bakers favor hard wheat flour with a lower protein content -- between 11 and 12percentt (bakers find the lower-protein flour easier to work with).
From One Good Dish by David Tanis (Artisan, RRP £17.99) Buy it from the Guardian Bookshop here Freekeh is an unusual Lebanese wheat with which I am obsessed.
But is it the full wheat flavor or what the loaf represents that has made "old-fashioned" or "artisan" bread the rallying point of good taste?
