Small-Batch Flours from Local Grains

For home bakers used to the consistency of supermarket commodities, small-batch flours require some adjustment—just as grass fed beef requires different cooking techniques than its corn-fed counterpart. But the variations in local grains, once you’ve learned to work with them, are precisely what make them worth the trouble…

“It all comes down to grain,” says Chef Dan Barber (of Blue Hill Farm in New York State). “Yes, because  it’s delicious—a whole world of flavor that’s been ignored for the past 50 years—but also because it is a critical missing link in any community’s ability to feed itself.”

“I think that’s one of the greatest things about the grains,” he says. “They change year to year…. It makes them that much more interesting. Each grain is a little bit different in itself.” …

Klaas Martens, who has been growing organic grains with his wife, Mary-Howell Martens, on their Finger Lakes farm for over a decade, echoes this sentiment. “I think we’ve bought into a false definition of quality with the industrial food system, and that quality is uniformity. With uniformity you bring up the worst, but you also eliminate excellence.”…

But when it comes to Northeast flour, the real miracle is loaves—that is, bread. Area farmers have had success growing soft wheat, the variety traditionally grown here, which is preferred for pastries, pancakes and cookies. In our climate it’s more difficult to grow so-called hard wheat, whose higher levels of gluten give yeasted bread its structure, producing the big air bubbles we’ve come to love in our loaves…

Some maintain that bread can be made from the Northeast’s traditional soft wheats. David Poorbaugh, president of McGeary Organics in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, bakes bread with his company’s pastry flour, called Daisy Flour. The loaves that come out of his oven don’t have the airy texture we’re used to nowadays, he says—but they’re delicious…

NOTE: Daisy flours are small batch flours produced by the roller-mill method, rather than the stone ground method discussed in this article.  To produce stone ground flour, the entire kernel of wheat is ground. Roller mill ground flour is a finer flour because the white flour within the kernel of grain is sifted out first – just plain flour. Then the bran and germ are finely ground and re-introduced into the flour to create each of Daisy’s whole wheat flours.

This article is excerpted from the July 7, 2010, issue of Edible Manhattan. To read the entire article on Breadwinners by Indrani Sen go to click here  http://www.ediblemanhattan.com/20100707/breadwinners/