If not, they can always be ordered online. You might be lucky enough to find them in your supermarket (my neighborhood Whole Foods stocks a variety of flours from Maine Grains, which is just a few states away from us). The best way to inject fresh flour flavor in your own baking is to get your hands on some of these stone-milled flours.

Jess Wagoner, the head baker at Appleton Farms, in Ipswich, Massachusetts, uses flours from Ground Up Grain in Hadley, and is a huge fan of the flavors they supply.

From a baker's perspective, baked goods are just that much more comforting when they evoke our senses in this way.”Įven when bakeries don’t mill their own flour, many of them are accessing regionally produced, fresh stone milled flour via the new generation of small- and medium-scale millers that have sprung up: Places like Maine Grains, Texas’s Barton Springs Mill, Farmer Ground Flour in New York, and Carolina Ground in North Carolina. Rye that smells like an orchard, corn that tastes like buttered cornbread just on its own, wheat that tastes the way spring smells in Maine. “And with grain, it can also provide a sense of place and a prolonged snapshot of a season. “Glenn wheat grown in Somerset County, Maine, tastes different from Red Fife grown in Illinois, she told me. Which means that more and more bakers are now milling and sifting flour in-house and turning it into breads and other baked goods straightway, to maximize fresh flour flavor.įor Kerry Hanney, of Night Moves Bread, in Biddeford, Maine, milling flour in-house means not only more flavor overall, but more flavor variety, as well. Companies like Vermont’s New American Stone Mills are producing a new generation of grist mills and flour sifters that are affordable, effective, and scaled to fit within the often-cramped confines of an average bakery. In parallel, the world of flour milling has seen a return to its roots. Whole wheat flour from our varieties straight out of the mill makes baked goods that have a bright open flavor, strong hints of sweet spices, maple, milk chocolate, and a buttery finish.” We are the first to breed for flavor and we find it every day. “My program has been in place since 1894. “If you breed for something you'll get it,” Jones says.

David Marshall at the USDA in Raleigh, North Carolina, are bringing new varieties of wheat to the market that not only produce high yields in the field and perform well in breads, but actually taste good. Stephen Jones at Washington State University’s Bread Lab, and Dr.

Through careful strain selection and crossbreeding, plant scientists like Dr. A renewed interest in fresh flours-and the increasing likelihood that a bag may not have to sit on a shelf for long periods-has encouraged grain breeders to seek out grains where a robust or interesting flavor is as important as any other trait.

Mother Grains by Roxana Jullapat