Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccum
Emmer is an ancient, hulled wheat that predates modern bread wheat and is cultivated in the Northeast as a heritage grain with a small but serious following. Penn State describes it as a tetraploid with 28 chromosomes, high protein, and a name that travels to the Italian table as farro.1 McGee counts emmer among the first wheats brought under cultivation, probably the second after einkorn, and notes that pockets of emmer farming survived in Europe long after bread wheat took over.23
In the Northeast, emmer is being reworked as a regional crop rather than a museum piece. Penn State, Cornell, and North Dakota State ran multi-year organic emmer trials at New York and Pennsylvania locations, and regional SARE projects have carried out participatory breeding of emmer and einkorn with organic farmers in New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Vermont.14 That institutional attention reflects real demand from millers and bakers for grains with a distinct local identity. The dark-kerneled form, black emmer, is the variety this notebook sources from Wild Hive Farm and uses for emmer tempeh.
Because emmer keeps its hull until milling and its kernels stay firm when cooked, it behaves less like flour wheat and more like a whole grain with backbone. Penn State lists pasta, bread, pilafs, and flatbreads among its uses, and that firm texture is exactly what makes it a useful tempeh substrate, where the grain has to stay legible while mold knits through it.1 It also shows up in malt-based plant milks, where its starch breaks down alongside rye and spelt.
Footnotes
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Penn State Plant Science, “Ancient Grains: Emmer”, accessed August 5, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 480. ↩
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 481. ↩
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Northeast SARE, “Participatory breeding of high-value wheat for the Northeast”, 2016, accessed August 5, 2026. ↩