I’ve always found freshly baked bread is comfort food of the highest order. There is something reassuring about the aroma of baking bread as it fills my kitchen and floats through the rest of my home. If I make a loaf early in the morning, I can almost guarantee that it will be devoured before the end of the day (with a little help from some little mouths in my house). And because I think about these thins, I began to wonder if I could find local flour to for my bread baking. After all I can find vegetables, fruits, eggs, dairy, and honey, could I do the same for flour? As it turns out the answer is, yes.

Most people probably think of flour as coming from our nation’s major grain producing states in the Midwest. I know I did. But before the industrial model of agriculture became the norm in the 20th century and our country was less mechanized overall, grains were grown by local farmers and taken to the local mill (Sen). Stone mills, like gristmills, were perfect for the soft varieties of wheat, traditionally grown in the Northeastern US. Stone milling preserves the nutritional essence of the wheat, unlike the flours we find in the supermarket today (Wight). Most flour produced today is so processed, basically stripped of its nutrients, that supplements and vitamins must be added back in to give it any nutritional value (Wight).

Not all wheat is the same; each variety has a different flavor and gluten content. Soft wheat is traditionally used in baking pastries and is more common in the Northeast. Hard wheat–-used for bread flour–is usually grown in the Midwest. But recently farmers in New York state have begun growing hard wheat varieties as well (Sen). And according to the Northern Grain Growers Association a number of other grains, in addition to soft winter wheat and hard wheat, are being grown in the region, including quinoa, spelt, buckwheat, millet, and flax.

Here in New York City, there are a number of vendors at the Greenmarket in Union Square where curious bakers can find some of these locally milled flours. To start there is Cayuga Pure Organics, where you can find whole wheat pastry, buckwheat, rye, and spelt flours. Oak Grove Plantation also carries cornmeal, whole wheat flour, whole wheat berries and popcorn. Wild Hive Farms sells whole wheat, oat and rye flours as well as bread baked with their flours.

Other purveyors of locally grown and milled flours include Daisy Flour in southeastern Pennsylvania, which has been producing their own soft wheat flours for over 100 years. There are also grain-based CSAs, such as the Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA, affiliated with the Wheatberry Bakery in Amherst, MA or Wild Hive Farms commercial grain CSA.

Of course, if you can’t make it to the market, many of these vendors have online stores where you can purchase the same flours sold at the farmer’s markets.

Locavore eating is moving beyond fruits and vegetables and into more nuanced and complex crops like wheat, oats, bulgur and spelt, and the possibilities are more wholesome, more nutricious and best of all, more delicious. The bread you bake with these local flours may be a little denser and less perfect looking than what you might find the in the store, but they will be more fulfilling in more ways than one, and can still be called comfort food.

Bibliography
Koening, Leah. “The Breadbasket of America: New England?” The Atlantic, March 2010
Sen, Indrani. “Breadwinners,” The Edible Blog, July 7, 2010.
Sen, Indrani. “Flour That Has the Flavor of Home,” The New York Times, September 10, 2008.
Wight, Heather. “The History and Processes of Milling,” HumJournal, January 25, 2011.