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  • From: Tompkins County Relocalization Project <tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • To: tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [tcrp-news] Fw: Flour That Has the Flavor of Home
  • Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:06:55 -0400

It would be great if we could put local growing of wheat together
with the rebuilding of our water-driven local mills.

Jon

==================================================================

The New York Times
September 10, 2008
Flour That Has the Flavor of Home
By INDRANI SEN

Millbrook, N.Y.

SQUINTING in the afternoon sun, Alton Earnhart strolled across his
farm here in the Hudson Valley one day last month with Don Lewis,
a baker and miller. Rows of wheat swayed to the horizon.

A farmer and a miller surveying fields of russet wheat would not
have been an unusual sight here on a late-summer day 200 years
ago. Gristmills once dotted the banks of streams and rivers
throughout New York, mapping out settlement just as subway
stations today chart New York City’s migratory patterns.

Today, nearly all of the nation’s wheat is grown on vast fields
and milled in factories in the Midwest. Over the past few years,
though, farmers and millers like Mr. Earnhart and Mr. Lewis have
begun restoring wheat fields and reviving flour mills around the
country.

In New Mexico, a cooperative of Native American and Latino farmers
produce a boutique local flour. In Western Massachusetts, a baking
couple has persuaded their customers to plant front-lawn wheat
patches. In Vermont, a farmer whose homegrown wheat flour was a
curiosity when he began growing it in the 1970s now can’t keep up
with demand. And in Pennsylvania, a venerable pastry flour brand
from the 1800s has been resurrected, made with local organic
wheat.

Similar movements have started around the globe, including in
Japan, where some udon noodle makers are using local wheat instead
of the Australian wheat they had relied upon, and in Israel, where
a group of Jewish and Arab farmers are trying to grow native
varieties of wheat to supplant the American wheat that dominates
the market there.

In New York, a consortium of farmers and bakers called Northeast
Organic Wheat is challenging the assumption that the state’s soil
and climate make high-quality wheat impossible. "That’s what I
heard that frustrated me 10 years ago, you can’t grow it here,"
said Mr. Earnhart. "That’s like saying to me, go do it."

Advocates of local foods have bemoaned the state of mass-produced
flour, even from higher-end brands. Midwestern wheat has been bred
for uniformity and yield instead of flavor or nutrition, they say,
and processed for shelf stability. But avoiding commercial flour
has been a challenge.

Against a backdrop of concerns over food and transportation costs
and with demand for local food growing, small wheat farmers see an
opportunity.

Since 1977, Jack and Anne Lazor have grown wheat and milled flour
at their dairy farm in Westfield, Vt. Until three or four years
ago, customers showed no interest in the flour, Mr. Lazor
said. Last winter, his flour sold out in January.

"It sure is amazing," he said. "Thirty years later, all of a
sudden I feel vindicated. We definitely went down the right road."

It might take a while to appreciate high-quality, small-batch
flours after a lifetime of eating food made with mass-produced
flour. Their musky fragrances are often more pronounced, and
variations in taste and texture bring a new range of complexity to
baked goods, making supermarket flour seem one dimensional by
comparison.

"Fresh-ground grains taste entirely different from the flour you
buy at the grocery store," said Mary-Howell Martens, who sells
organic feed and seed in Penn Yan, N.Y., and grinds her own flour
at home. "Everyone knows that a January tomato that comes from
Mexico tastes different than an August tomato taken straight from
the vine. It’s the same with grains."

In New York, Northeast Organic Wheat is holding workshops on
threshing, cleaning and milling wheat, and exploring marketing
alternatives such as baker-farmer partnerships and farm-share
groups, where members pick up a weekly allotment of grains to
grind into flour themselves using a small mill. They are also
experimenting with older grains grown here when New York was the
region’s breadbasket, as well as ancient wheat varieties.

This region is supposedly too rainy for hard red spring wheat, the
high-gluten wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the early
fall. But some are growing it anyway because it is good for making
bread. Others are sticking with the soft white winter wheat,
low-gluten grain that’s planted in the fall and harvested in early
summer that was traditionally grown here and is generally used for
pastry and cake flour.

Mr. Lewis called his first encounter with soft local flour eight
years ago a revelation. He was picking up some organic feed for
his hens from Mr. Earnhart’s farm, Lightning Tree, when he came
upon a barrel of flour that Mr. Earnhart had made with a small
mill.

"I stuck my hand in it and I said, oh boy," Mr. Lewis
recalled. "It felt different, it smelled different, it tasted
different. It was intriguing."

Mr. Lewis bought a second-hand milling machine and began grinding
Mr. Earnhart’s wheat. From his bakery at Wild Hive Farm, Mr. Lewis
now sells bagged flour as well as breads, cookies, scones,
biscuits and pastries, all made from local grains.

Creating a market for local wheat takes more than just planting
seeds.

Cheryl Maffei and Jonathan Stevens, who own Hungry Ghost Bread in
Northampton, Mass., have persuaded 100 of their customers to grow
plots of wheat in their yards. A year ago, when they started
seeking local wheat, Ms. Maffei said, their attitude was a tad
naïve.

"We thought, we’re bakers, and we want our flour to be local, more
local than North Dakota, and all we have to do is ask the farmers
to grow it and we’ll buy it," she recalled.

When she spoke to farmers, though, she found that nobody knew
which varieties of wheat would thrive in the area, and the
cleaning, milling and storage facilities needed for flour
production didn’t exist locally. Ms. Maffei and Mr. Stevens began
working with nearby colleges to identify wheat varieties to test,
Ms. Maffei said. The customer plots, which were harvested last
month, were trial runs and raised consciousness about the
wheat. Already, Ms. Maffei said, the three patches they planted at
the bakery have brought in curious customers. "They’ve never even
seen wheat growing," she marveled.

But there is a long road ahead. The closest miller who can produce
the flour they need is in Quebec. "With our infrastructure here,
we also lost the knowledge of wheat and milling and storing," she
said. "So we’re rebuilding it as we go."

In New York, those who have ventured into wheat farming for flour
have been mostly producers of animal feed for the lucrative
organic meat market. The state’s wheat supply is small and the
weather is unpredictable. Setting up the cleaning, milling,
sifting and storage facilities required for a small-scale mill
like Wild Hive’s costs at least $30,000, Mr. Lewis said.

And the resulting flour can be finicky, bakers and home cooks have
found. Mass-produced flour is tested and often blended for
consistent, precise gluten levels. Small-batch flour can vary from
season to season, farm to farm and even field to field, with
different gluten content, flavor or levels of water
absorption. Bakers used to uniform results have trouble adjusting.

Supermarket flour is roller-milled and sifted to remove as much
bran and germ as possible, making it shelf-stable for months or
years. Most of the local flours are stone-ground, and even the
white flours retain some wheat germ and can go rancid within weeks
if not frozen, because the oils of the wheat germ oxidize.

Members of the local wheat movement want to shift Americans’
attitudes toward bread. Bakers must learn to adapt their recipes
to the qualities of the flour, they say, as people did before
mass-produced flour. And consumers used to buying the same loaf
every day must adjust their expectations and learn to tolerate
some variation.

That is easier said than done, said Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread in
Manhattan, who has tried to use small-batch regional flour in her
bakery but found it too inconsistent in quality and supply. She
likes the principle of a baker responding to the quirks and
nuances of flour, she said, but expecting her entire staff to do
so on the fly is impractical. And if something goes wrong, a
botched batch could mean 400 pounds of dough in the trash.

"Our wholesale customers are restaurants and stores," Ms. Scherber
said. "If you send a flat-looking loaf of bread, they’ll say, we
don’t like it."

Also, the soft wheat flours grown in the Northeast have low gluten
and won’t produce the moist, springy crumb that Americans prize in
bread.

"It is perfectly fine for building very dense, very grainy
Germanic breads," said Matt Funiciello, the owner of Rock Hill
Bakehouse in Moreau, N.Y. The key, said Mr. Funiciello, is to
embrace the difference.

"Don’t expect this bread to be similar to what you’ve had before,"
he said. "If you open your mind and your palate to it, you’ll
realize that, hey, flour tastes like something. Wheat has a flavor
that’s unique."

June Russell, the farm inspections coordinator for Greenmarket,
hopes variability might eventually become a selling point for
bread, as it has for other foods.

"Our cheese-makers at market will talk about their differences
season to season," Ms. Russell said. "They’ll say, Our milk is
really rich right now because the cows are eating this or
that. You’ll never hear a baker talk like that, and that’s because
everyone is basically getting their flour from the same big
system." She is working with Northeast Organic Wheat, organizing
information sessions and questionnaires about their bakers’ needs.

Organizers in New York look to older local wheat movements for
inspiration. In New Mexico, for example, the Sangre de Cristo
Cooperative, a collective of small-scale wheat growers, produces
flour for local bakeries and co-ops.

Craig Mapel, an official with the New Mexico Department of
Agriculture, helped start the wheat project in 1994 in the
mountains north of Albuquerque. He said wheat had not been grown
in the area for 50 years. Farmers in the program now plant more
than 400 acres with wheat, Mr. Mapel said, and sell 250,000 to
350,000 pounds of flour a year.

"There have certainly been bumps in the road," he said. But, he
added, "it worked, because they’re still there."

In 2002, McGeary Organics, a grain merchant, bought a mill built
in the 1740s in Annville, Pa., and resurrected the venerable
Pennsylvania pastry flour known as Daisy Flour, milling local soft
wheat.

"In the 1800s, if you were a self-respecting housewife in
Lancaster, Pa., you couldn’t operate unless you had Daisy Flour in
your cupboard," said David Poorbaugh, the company’s
president. "We’re all romantics, and that’s part of the reason
that we do this. I think we’re lucky if we break even with this
old mill."

Mr. Earnhart, the farmer, hopes local wheat will catch on, but
he’s also apprehensive. Greater demand might bring calls for more
standardization, he said. He doesn’t want to end up on the same
path as large-scale wheat producers.

"The idea that we have to get it so sophisticated that everything
is perfect kind of defeats what I think made this unique when we
started out," he said. "One of the things that we have to decide
is how far we want to go."





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