Triticum monococcum
Einkorn is the simplest wheat and one of the first to be cultivated, domesticated roughly ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent.12 It is diploid, carrying just the standard two sets of chromosomes, and it is a hulled or “covered” wheat: the grain stays wrapped in a papery husk after threshing and needs an extra step to free it.2 Its gluten behaves differently from modern bread wheat’s, with roughly twice as much gliadin as glutenin, which makes a sticky, fluid dough unsuited to rising breads but workable for pasta and flatbreads.1 The grain is high in protein and rich in yellow carotenoid pigments that give its flour a golden tint.13
The Northeast has become part of einkorn’s comeback. A Cornell-led project with GrowNYC is testing which ancient and heritage wheat varieties perform best under organic conditions in Northeastern climates, while Greenmarket connects Upstate New York farmers with bakers and shoppers in New York City; einkorn and emmer had sat out of mainstream production for nearly a century.4 The notebook’s einkorn pasta work uses 00 einkorn flour from Wild Hive in the Hudson Valley, testing how the dough handles at different kneading times.
Footnotes
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF pp. 479–480. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009), PDF p. 39. ↩ ↩2
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McGee, On Food and Cooking, PDF p. 481. ↩
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Cornell Media Relations, “Ancient grains making a gourmet comeback in NYC,” advisory, accessed August 4, 2026. ↩