Renan Wheat

Triticum aestivum

Renan is a French winter bread wheat variety created by AgriObtentions, a subsidiary of INRAE, and registered in the early 1990s. It is a modern hexaploid wheat, carrying six chromosome sets inherited from three grass ancestors, but its practical appeal is less about its genome than its combination of baking quality and field resilience.¹ Cornell’s New York seed directory describes Renan as popular with bakers and chefs, increasingly grown by organic farmers in the United States, and tolerant of cereal rusts and Septoria leaf spot.²

Its flour is prized for a subtly sweet aroma and a delicate, buttery crumb — Unified Mills describes Renan bread as tasting buttered even when it isn’t — which suits naturally leavened loaves and French-style baking.³ In the Northeast it has found a home with regional grain projects: Unified Mills sells a bread flour made from Renan grown organically in New York’s Finger Lakes and milled in small batches at Birkett Mills in upstate New York.³ Cornell’s directory also lists a Finger Lakes grower offering certified Renan seed, a small but concrete sign that the variety belongs to the region’s working grain system rather than only to imported-variety catalogs.²

In this notebook Renan appears as a koji substrate rather than a bread flour. Pearled Renan wheat grew strong mold growth in the grain-substrate trials in Koji, and a three-day cure in Renan shio koji made the tofu in shio koji tofu intensely sour, salty, and soft.