Flour As Flavour

A plea to white flour bakers

“Flour is flavour” I say to my customers and in every workshop I teach. Flour is food, not just a base for fermentation and sweetening. Nutrient dense grains need to be a key part of our diets. Even if you are celiac- there is quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, sorghum and more. Most bakeries remove all the nutritional elements of the grain so they can achieve what is considered artisan baking.

But I believe that the term “artisan” extends all the way to ingredients. Meaning use the best- the most sustainable, the most delicious, the most local. It’s all connected. Just like there is a movement to cut back on food waste and use the trimmings, the bones, the stalks; think of a wheat kernel the same way! Why remove the bran and sift out the germ? That is where flavour lies.

When we started our cracker business, I knew we had to use local flour. Local flour at that time meant wholegrain flour, as the farmers who had stone mills, weren’t sifting. So the crackers were born and we haven’t gone back to using sifted flour in any of our products. While there is certainly a good argument to be made for sifting out some of the bran, let’s just move forward and go with “all the grain.” Whole grains are a way to express terroir and move away from commodification and homogeneity.

When we chose to work with Ontario whole grains, we didn’t really understand how much that would dictate what we ended up baking and deepen our understanding of terroir. To us, local grains are synonymous with whole grains. How could I ask the miller to discard most of what gives the grain it’s special flavor? And, from a business perspective, why would I pay more for less FLAVOUR? 

Using only locally grown whole grains can appear to put one into a narrow box. But having limitations is a great creative push to take risks and create things outside what you know. A limited pantry forces creativity : how many ways can I use buckwheat without  turning everything grey and earthy tasting…how many combinations of grains can I do so the flavors are different? Quite a bit, actually. Treating flour as flavour has changed the way I bake and lead me to a deeper commitment to pursuing what I call “grain-forward” baking.

When you start treating grains as flavours, as their own ingredient, you don’t miss the white flour. Using a combination of grains of varying gluten quality, absorption and flavour allows us a lot of room for creativity. And the flavour is coming from the germ and the bran, which is another reason for using wholegrain.

When you look at these whole grains, they are not just widgets to plug into recipes, you see the story and the farmer and miller behind each one. Each grain has its own personality and flavour. Using exclusively these grains is how we can create a local grain economy. And by not discarding any of the bran and the germ, we honour all the work that goes into growing grains and the art of milling. And honestly, the price we pay for the grain, I am not going to throw any of it away, to achieve what is already familiar. 

We understand the terroir of wine, let’s apply it to grains.  Who wants to drink a California style cab made in Ontario? In using wholegrain, it’s tempting to cut it with white flour to achieve the holey grail of crumb structure, oven spring and recognizable sourdough flavor, but don’t. Embrace the individuality of local grains, so there isn’t the same style of loaf from San Francisco to New York. We have an opportunity to use grains as a means of expressing local flavours. It’s okay if our local grain doesn’t give use large crumb holes, it’s okay if the grain we have might not be as sweet as the grain grown elsewhere. ( The red fife I am now using tastes quite different from the fife I used to buy from the eastern part of the province- different soils mean different tastes). It’s okay to be different.

We use local whole grains and figure out the best way to bring the grain to it’s fullest expression of where it is grown. Instead of my Instagram feed crowded with hairy forearms holding up high extraction loaf crumb shots, I would love to see them holding up baked goods made from local whole grains!  It doesn’t have to be bread. It could be cookies or scones or crackers. 

When you are getting into small batch grains, you need to take off your bread bakers hat with it’s expectations of consistent  of protein levels and other typical characteristics of what you normally use. Approach the grain with a fresh perspective and see where it takes you….more like an artisan and figure out how to coax the best out of the grain.

So many wholegrain recipes we find in baking books still have huge amounts of white flour and too much sugar to cover the blandness of the white flour. There is no need.  For our work, we have found that pure whole grain sweet baking has become an easy access point for people to take a chance and instantly notice the extra depth wholegrain adds. We are continually working on developing more sweet and savoury pastries, cakes, cookies every market season.

So when I start to make something out of wholegrains, it’s a process. First make it tasty, then it is the challenge of making it better and then how can I add more buckwheat, bran, rye or more barley.  Our goal is to push people’s expectations on what wholegrains can do, how they taste and showcase that a regional grain economy is possible and desirable.

Developing formulas that highlight whole grains and give the texture and flavor I want and customers will like, takes time. I play around with multiple grains for different tastes, searching for a different shade of brown (the wholegrain world can be awfully monotone), and to highlight a certain sweet or savory filling.   We are constantly tweaking and changing and experimenting with different ratios of wholegrain flours, fats and liquids to achieve what we want and to suit each grain’s personality..our own little 50 shades of brown….and it is not just flavor, it is visual, it’s colour, it’s texture. So when I am buying buckwheat I want to know how dark is it, how earthy is it and how will this change what I am already making? We use barley in three forms- regular, malted and toasted. We are starting to play around with other malted and toasted grains. I want to start smoking some green wheat and other grains, too. The possibilities are endless.

 Our customers know what we offer tastes better and is better for the local economy, better from a nutritional standpoint and offers a personal connection in their shopping, but it can be hard to get them to understand that we all need to make a living and that means charging a certain price. We are all in this together- we need to be generous with each other and share our formulas, experiments, marketing and mistakes.  It is the only way to push this movement forward. Through transparency and sharing we raise the level of everyone’s baking and inspire each other to push harder, be more creative and more successful.