By Emily Buehler, WSM Website Coordinator
I found the Carolina Ground flour mill in the peaceful outskirts of Asheville. From the outside, it didn’t look like what you’d expect: no towers of grain, no rustic wooden building, and certainly no archaic waterwheel left from the old days. The milling facility is inside a massive brick building along with several other businesses. Founder Jennifer Lapidus was waiting for me outside the loading dock and led me inside.
The mill itself made up for the lack of ambiance outdoors: it’s an Osttiroler made by a small family-owned business in Austria, and it has beautiful wooden panels that just reveal the giant stones that grind the grain. The mill, Jennifer tells me, was en route to Australia when its owner, famed bread oven builder and Jennifer’s mentor Alan Scott, passed away. Carolina Ground rescued it and brought it to Asheville.
One-ton sacks of grain fill the rest of the room: rye, hard bread wheat, soft pastry wheat, and buckwheat. All of the grain is organic and local, mostly from North Carolina farms plus some from Virginia and Georgia. Sacks of ground flour wait on palettes to be shipped to bakeries.
The idea for a local flour mill began in 2008, when the price of flour increased drastically, not due to a bad harvest but because of manipulation by Wall Street bankers. (Carolina Ground refers to this article for a detailed explanation.) It was a turning point for bakers like Jennifer. “There was a profound realization that they were that disconnected from their most essential ingredient,” she says. She began working on the North Carolina Organic Bread Flour Project, sponsored by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, to locate local wheat growers and reconnect them with millers and bakers. The Carolina Ground mill is a result.
Carolina Ground is not just about making bread more local; it’s about milling as a craft. The millers—Jennifer and Kim Thompson—grind 1000 to 2000 pounds of grain each day. (An average mill grinds 120,000 pounds per day.) The miller is responsible for setting the stones to properly crush the grains in a slow, consistent manner; Jennifer says they listen to the mill working and watch the speed of grain falling through it to determine if it is grinding correctly. They also feel the resulting flour and monitor the waste that builds up at the mill’s filters.
Cold-stone milling grinds flour without heating it. Jennifer explains the benefits: “What we provide with these flours is flavor and nutrients. Cold-stone milling to protect the nutrients is part of it, but the flavor is also key, just as important… What we’re delivering here is the ability to work with a whole new palette of flavors.” She scoops a handful of flour out of a sack, running her thumb over it to feel its richness. “Our flours, they’re just beautiful,” she says. “This is ancient technology here. The germ, the oils are spread into that endosperm flour… and you can feel it in the flour.”
Our bread bakers began using Carolina Ground rye flour in the miche and deli rye breads. They also created the new Dark Rye (pictured to the left) to showcase Carolina Ground’s flour. In addition, Carolina Ground’s whole wheat flour is available to customers in our bulk bins. Jon, one of our bakers, offers these tips for baking with it: “It has the germ intact and a higher ash content, which basically means it soaks up a bunch more water. For home bakers, if they increase the water in their recipes by 5 to 10% and if they presoak the flour overnight, they will have success with it.”
The Dark Rye will be on sale for $3.19/loaf the week of November 11 through November 17.