Triticum dicoccum
Black emmer is a dark-kerneled emmer wheat, one of the old hulled wheats that sits much closer to the earliest history of agriculture than modern bread flour does. McGee notes emmer among the first cereals brought under human selection, which is part of why it reads less like a novelty grain than a surviving branch of an older grain world.1
In the Northeast it matters as a grain that can be grown, milled, and cooked with a distinctly local identity. Wild Hive describes its black emmer berries as whole kernels with a robust, earthy flavor, subtle nuttiness, and a slightly chewy texture, and those are exactly the qualities that make the grain persuasive in savory applications instead of merely historical.2
Because emmer is hulled and comparatively chewy in the pot, it often keeps more definition after cooking or steaming than a softer flour wheat would.2 That makes it useful in projects where texture matters as much as flavor, including ferments like Emmer Tempeh, where the grain has to stay legible enough for the mold to knit through it without turning to paste.
Footnotes
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 466. ↩
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Wild Hive Farm, “Black Emmer Berries,” accessed July 29, 2026. ↩ ↩2