(upbeat music) - [Narrator] What makes the perfect donut?

- Chewy, crunchy and soft.

(Stephanie laughs) So when you're frying it off, you get that nice crisp outside, and then you're getting all those pillowy air pockets.

So for me, I would say like the perfect donut is something that can be like eaten plain and it's still great.

- [Narrator] In other words, it's the dough.

(upbeat music) So what's in that dough?

(upbeat music) Wheat in the Northwest probably isn't what you think it is.

Sure, it goes into breads, cereals, noodles, and beer, but it's more likely to end up in something like this.

- Everyone always thinks rice.

Chinese food is rice.

- Yeah.

- But no, there's like a whole huge lexicon of Chinese cuisine that comes from wheat.

- [Narrator] Wheat is big business in the Northwest, but the vast majority goes abroad.

It's one of Oregon's most valuable export crops, and it mostly ends up in countries in Asia.

The kind of wheat grown in the Northwest is perfect for things like crackers, cakes, and steam buns, the house specialty at XLB in Portland.

- And what's really flexible and great about wheat is that you can use it in so many different applications.

You know, you can make soup dumplings, you can make bao.

You can take the bao and make your own filling.

It doesn't have to be a Chinese filling.

It can be your own, you know, mixed meal and put it in a bao, you know.

It becomes a handheld delicious treat.

- I like a little bit of bite to my bao dough.

I don't know if that's just a little bit more American of me but my mom really likes the super light and fluffy and pillowy bao dough, you know.

It's like everybody has a connection to dumplings and bao.

- [Narrator] That connection starts in a field kind of like this one.

- My family has owned land and farmed here since 1950s.

Many of the crops that we raise were focused on turf for lawns, golf courses, and we thought, you know, maybe we should try to get back a little more basic to some food crop that we can share with our neighbors.

- [Narrator] This is soft white winter club wheat.

It was planted in October and has been growing and maturing for months.

Now, it's August, time to harvest before the rain comes.

And nearby, the stone mill is up and running, turning previously harvested soft white into flour.

- At the mill today, when you visited, we happened to be milling a club wheat, soft white club wheat, which is the premium pastry flour.

It's pretty slow milling.

It's kind of soft and a little bit gummy compared to bread wheat.

It's low protein.

When you put that between these two big 900 pound stones, you're just smearing that all together.

It's simple technology.

It's been around for thousands of years.

- [Narrator] Soft white is what the Pacific Northwest is known for but it's just one of a huge number of varieties of wheat, many of which can be found growing on the Hunton's farm.

- It's grown from hard red spring wheat and teff to rye and spelt and emmer and einkorn.

- Red fife is one of my favorites.

I don't know, it just has kind of the components of hard white and hard red together.

I like einkorn because it's a little nutty.

- [Narrator] Einkorn is one of the oldest forms of wheat, a variety that can be traced back to before the dawn of agriculture itself.

(upbeat music) Wheat is a grass that reproduces when its seed head shatters and the berries inside gets spread on the ground.

Archeological evidence suggests that humans have been eating those seeds for tens of thousands of years, if not longer.

At some point, people figured out that places that had grass one season would likely have it again next season.

And it was perhaps a short leap from there to something that starts to look like farming.

Compared to other foods at the time, wheat was predictable and storeable.

That helped humans in some places to set up cities, writing, trade routes, soldiers, and empires.

Fast forward a few thousand years and the latest in a long line of wheat-based empires finds its way to the Pacific Northwest.

There eons of volcanic activity combined with silt from gigantic glacial floods created rich soil which supported a variety of indigenous food staples and happened to be perfect for wheat.

Soon, white colonists were growing more wheat than they needed.

They headed east to drier, better wheat climates.

Barges and then railroads made it possible to ship huge amounts of wheat to a growing port city at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers.

There, it could be loaded onto tall ocean going ships, the wheat fleets, bound for ports abroad.

Today, Portland is the largest wheat shipping port in the US.

It's where grain from all over the West is shipped to countries like Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia.

The vast majority of Oregon wheat is soft white and is grown east of the Cascade Mountains.

Low in protein, perfect for noodles and cakes, soft white wheat is one of the Northwest's biggest contributions to the global food system.

But not all Northwest wheat ends up overseas.

- I always considered the donut more of a fine pastry.

The goal was to take the donut and the impression of what people had of what a donut was and really elevate that.

So our raised donuts is a brioche recipe that we developed.

It was kind of the first donut that we really wanted to like hone in and like make perfect.

And butter is kind of the big thing that everybody really likes about these donuts.

You know, you're touching the dough, you're feeling the dough.

You're like, got your eye on it all the time.

'Cause it's kinda, it's its own like living thing.

Like we wanted like high gluten flour or something that we could really beat up.

And then we roll it out, make our doughnuts, proof them again in our proof box.

And then we fry.

(upbeat music) And glaze, of course.

I love our flour because it's been really thoughtfully put together.

'Cause all flours are just like slightly different.

And they'll say that like this flour has a range of this kind of protein content.

So when I'm trying to assess what kind of flour I'm looking for, it's a lot more about trial and error and then trying it again and then trying it again.

We're like a science experiment around here.

- [Narrator] Creating the perfect flour requires a mind boggling number of things to go right.

Here, a Japanese-style sponge cake is being put to the test.

Breeders around the region constantly create new wheat varieties adapted to the needs of regional farmers and global eaters.

- It seems like it's quite simple and in certain ways it is.

But when you get down to details, particularly like adapting a particular like flour specification then there are a whole lot of subtleties that can be addressed.

- [Narrator] It starts with the genetics of the plant, like height, color, and hardness of the seed.

Then there's the environment, how much rain fell this season?

How hot did it get?

How much nitrogen was in the soil?

Then there's milling and blending.

How much protein or gluten is in the flour?

How much water does it absorb?

After generations of breeding, a new variety might be ready for a test bake, maybe a cookie or a cracker or a cake.

It's scanned, poked, prodded, and analyzed to see if the wheat it came from will satisfy a huge range of palates all over the world.

So what's in the dough?

How about history?

- We've been eating the seeds of wheat and its relatives for a very, very long time.

The horizon probably goes back at least 15,000 years, you know, before what we normally think of as the horizon of agriculture.

- [Narrator] Science, geography.

- Well we only have to go back to 150 years when this area was homesteaded and there were flour mills on every little river up and down the Willamette Valley.

- [Narrator] Family.

- For me, it is just what we've always grown up with.

As a kid, making dumplings, making buns, for me that's the definition of family and home and just comfort.

- [Narrator] And little bites of joy.

- Don't have to make people happy because everybody has moments in their life that they remember eating a donut.

- [Narrator] Yeah, it's just a donut.

But the wheat in that donut is also a symbol, of an ancient and ongoing human story.

(upbeat music)