The Story
If the fire went out, my eyes would open at exactly 2 a.m. From my bedroom within my little shotgun house adjacent to the bakery, even from a deep sleep, my body always knew 2 a.m. I’d be pulled from sleep because my wood was green or because it was raining, or both—moisture from the wood and the air threatened to smother the flames.
The evening before each bake, I’d carefully choose the wood that would burn in my oven—ideally, seasoned hardwood—aiming to get the right amount of heat built up within the time it took for my bulk doughs to ferment, get divided and shaped, and perform their final rise or proof. For twelve hours the fire would burn within the chamber that would eventually bake the bread. The fire burned to coals, the coals to ash. The ash was swept out and the hearth mopped clean before well-proofed loaves were loaded into the chamber and baked within the heat radiating from the oven’s mass. My normal baker’s hour was 4 a.m. For over a decade, this was my life. Rising before the sun, tending to fire, flour, water, and salt. With my Natural Bridge Bakery, located in the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina, I produced naturally leavened breads baked in a wood-fired brick oven. And then, after fourteen years, my focus shifted and my lens widened. I stepped away from baking and became a miller.
What started as a concept—to revive a regional grains economy centered on a community mill—became Carolina Ground, placing me, as miller, between the farmer and baker, bridging these worlds—from farm-grade to food-grade, from crop to ingredient. Cold stone-ground flour of predominantly Southern grains, this flour is the conduit between Southern, independent, often conservative farmers and innovative, mostly urban, Instagram-savvy bakers. Although I can never quite remove the baker from my core self, it was the flour that pulled me in this deep. How I arrived in the position of miller is one unbroken narrative—from baking for my community to harnessing a community of bakers. It is a narrative that seeks to reclaim elements of our past that I believe should never have been sacrificed in the service of progress.
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I first attempted to bake bread in 1990, my junior year of college. Flour, water, salt, honey, oil, commercial baking yeast, and sometimes eggs and milk went into those loaves. I had my mother’s copy of Beard on Bread to guide me, and I stumbled through some pretty awful bakes before I finally began to find my way. With each bake, I understood a little bit more. Baking pulled me in. I was drawn to something at the core—a history, a story of a different time, and a different way of life. After graduation, I continued to bake weekly. I was studying for the LSATs, with plans to go to law school, and had started a little baking business out of my apartment. Friends and friends of friends picked up bread from me once a week. And with each weekly bake, my interest grew, and not just to baking, but to a deeper understanding of bread. I felt a familiarity with bread baking. It was a visceral attraction not grounded in my own experience of time and place. I began to wonder about the RapidRise yeast I was using. The claim rapid implied that there had been an improvement on a slower method, that something had come before in bread’s story. With each bake my gut kept telling me I was just skimming the surface. There was no World Wide Web to search yet, and very few publications addressed natural leavening at the time, as there were very few bakers producing naturally leavened breads. But I had this gut sense that the bread I was baking was not living up to the potential of what bread could be, so I began looking for the information, trying to find some crumb of evidence that revealed bread’s past. And then during a weekend work-stay on an organic farm in Blairsville, Georgia, at the end of a long day of weeding, I was flipping through a copy of Biodynamics Journal and came to an article entitled “Berkshire Mountain Bakery—The Art of Natural Baking.” The article was an interview with Berkshire Mountain’s baker, Richard Bourdon, and it began: “Before the art of baking joined forces with the brewing industry, the baker would assemble his commonplace ingredients on the stage—simple things the peasants knew quite well, like flour, water, and salt—mix them together, and then pull out something entirely different, something that could never have been predicted with those three humble ingredients.” Reading those first few words, I knew I had landed on something: I’d found a glimpse into bread’s past. The article’s author, Joel Morrow, affirmed, “The taste had nothing to do with the floury, yeasty, grainy, adulterated products that are passed off as bread today, even in the organic health food industry, even among dedicated small organic bakers.” Here was the evidence: just three humble ingredients.
A few weeks later, at a local bookstore in Athens, Georgia, I picked up a copy of The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book and opened directly to a section titled “Flemish Desem Bread.” Laurel describes this naturally leavened old-world bread as “Composed of just a few ingredients—wheat, water, salt—the loaves are light and delicious without sweetener, milk, fat, or yeast…To us, this is the perfect Staff of Life.” Laurel counsels the home baker that “it can be done, it is not all that difficult, and once you get set up, making the bread is simplicity itself.” One begins by making the desem (pronounced day-zum) culture or starter, what Laurel calls “the spirit or soul…that gives life to the dough.” The process sounded simple: just form a stiff dough ball out of flour and water, bury the dough ball in a sack of flour, and every day for two weeks, pull out the dough ball, discard half of it, dissolve the other half in water, add flour until another stiff dough ball is formed, and then bury it again in the sack of flour. But fresh stone-ground whole-wheat flour was listed as the first ingredient needed to make this bread. Although I could get whole-wheat flour in the bulk section of my local food co-op, I had no idea how the flour was milled or how fresh it was. I attempted to follow Laurel’s instructions, but my inability to find the key ingredient was disorienting. Developing the desem culture required temperatures ranging from 50° to 65°F. It was summertime in Georgia. I was to rely on my senses to guide the process—the smell of the dough ball each day—but nothing seemed right, and I wasn’t even sure if I would recognize right.
I was supposed to be studying for the LSATs, but I was determined to find my way with this bread, which morphed into finding bakers baking this bread. I wanted to see the bread being made, feel the dough, and smell the culture. In search of bakers, I scanned my bookshelf for the few baking books I owned and pulled down Uprisings, a compilation of recipes by cooperative and collective bakeries from around the country put together by the Cooperative Whole Grain Educational Association. On the inside cover I found a phone number and called. A friendly voice on the other end of the line informed me that bakers would be gathering for the association’s annual meeting in two weeks in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at a bakery that was producing desem bread.
Propelled by this single focus, I traveled to Arkansas. And I met bakers. Which was what led me in the opposite direction from law school to the hills of Marin County, California, and an apprenticeship with Alan Scott, a mythic figure who was baking naturally leavened whole-grain breads for his community in a wood-fired brick oven he’d built in his backyard.
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Alan Scott was a creative. And he was a dear friend of Laurel Robertson, author of The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. When Laurel was testing the Flemish desem bread for her book, she was baking it in her gas oven. She brought a loaf to Alan, who felt this old-world bread would be well served by the similarly old-world technology of baking in a wood-fired brick oven. And so Alan designed and built his first wood-fired brick oven for Laurel’s desem bread. The radiant heat of the masonry oven provided the bread with added oven spring and produced a deep golden bronze crust. Alan was so excited by the results that he learned to bake desem bread himself, built his own oven, and began baking.
At Alan’s, we made only that whole-grain Flemish desem bread. We mixed and kneaded the dough by hand. He welcomed visitors readily, and I suspected it was to get more help with kneading the huge mounds of dough. The only machinery employed was the small stone-burr gristmill we used to grind our flour freshly for each bake. He believed in fresh flour. This was key, and so, too, was the stone mill used to create the quality of flour he deemed essential. There is simply no mistaking fresh, stone-ground flour, especially when working with whole grains. It is the difference between an original piece of artwork and a print. Since there was no local mill from which to purchase freshly stone-ground flour, milling grain was the first step in our bread-baking process. We milled whole-grain flour to feed the desem culture, which would eventually leaven our bread, made with only the culture, whole-grain flour, water, and sea salt. The oven was fueled with wood we collected on the property.
Alan’s kitchen was hardly legal for a baking business—we kneaded dough on the same table upon which we had eaten supper only a few hours earlier. The mill where we ground our flour was kept under the stairwell in the foyer of his house. There was no name for this baking endeavor—it was just Alan’s bread. His customers kept standing orders and we delivered warm bread directly to their doors, sans packaging.
Because of this old-world bread, so well paired with the ancient technology of a wood-fired brick oven, Alan turned designing and building wood-fired brick ovens into a business. His ovens could be found all over the Bay Area and beyond, in both residential and commercial settings. He drew a constant stream of visitors ranging from backwoods hippies to chefs from highly acclaimed culinary circles. It was the early ’90s. A renaissance of artisan baking was unfolding, and Alan was at its forefront.
Eventually it was time for me to leave and begin my own bakery. I returned to the South because of a boyfriend. He was farming vegetables on his great-grandparents’ land in Tennessee. I taught him to bake desem bread, and with Alan’s help, we built an oven and launched a bakery. We named it Natural Bridge Bakery because in its first location, in Sewanee, Tennessee, there was a natural bridge at the end of our road, and because the desem culture we used to leaven our breads provided a natural bridge between grain and loaf, Old World and New. I modeled the bakery after Alan’s, though it was housed in a health department–sanctioned kitchen next door to our home kitchen. I ordered a small stone-burr mill from a tiny company called Jansen Grist Mills. The Jansens, of course friends of Alan’s, were building wooden-hulled mills in a shop behind their house in North Carolina’s Brushy Mountains.
I married the boyfriend and our daughter was born. The marriage didn’t last, but the bakery did, and after four years of baking in Sewanee, we relocated to Western North Carolina, where I became the only wood-fired-brick-oven baker of naturally leavened breads in the Asheville area.
By the early 2000s, the renaissance in artisan baking begun in the ’90s had taken hold nationwide, and I soon found myself part of a vibrant baking community in Western North Carolina. I was no longer the sole wood-fired-brick-oven baker—Flat Rock Village Bakery in Flat Rock, North Carolina, and Wake Robin Farm Breads in Marshall, North Carolina, had joined the ranks. In 2004, the Asheville Bread Festival was born, bringing together all of us bakers from Asheville and the surrounding communities of Brevard, Sylva, Saluda, Flat Rock, Marshall, and Boone. A common thread connected us: we were bakers, rising before the sun, working long hours, passionate and committed.
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When I set up my bakery, I assembled what I considered the crucial pieces: the culture or natural leavening, the stone-burr gristmill, and the wood-fired oven. The farmer was not yet a part of my equation. I bought my grain from a miller in Middle River, Minnesota, and he bought his grain from the growers that lived in the vicinity of his mill—a thousand miles from where my bread was baked. For the other bakers in my community, their situation was not that much different—although many bought their flour from North Carolina mills, most of that grain was grown a thousand miles from where it was milled, in Kansas and beyond, and blended into functional, homogenous, commodity flour. In the spring of 2008 our lack of connection to the farmers who grew our grain became painfully apparent. The price of wheat rose to a historic high. At its worst, the price would rise as much as 130 percent, far beyond what we bakers could pass along to our customers in the cost of a loaf of bread. The cause of the price hike was unclear, though the effect it had on our businesses was profound. This was not the normal highs and lows of commodity pricing influenced by crop conditions. There was something else at play that had affected the price and availability of wheat, some entity far removed from the interplay between soil, sun, and rain, or wheat, water, and sea salt. We had no direct relationship with growers and we were left in the dark.
What occurred in 2008 could be traced back to 1991, with the establishment of the Commodity Index fund established by Goldman Sachs. This was followed by changes in US monetary fund policy that enabled futures contracts on funds one step (or many steps) removed from the actual commodity. And then in 2007, a decline in the value of the dollar and an increase in the price of oil spurred the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which resulted in a rush by investors globally to trade dollars for commodities—including wheat—thus causing volatile price increases. And yet because a loaf of bread must remain affordable, the baker took the hit. Our daily bread—sustenance and symbol—was at the mercy of Wall Street.
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In 2001, public wheat breeder and pathologist Dr. David Marshall arrived as the new research leader of the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’d moved from Texas A&M University, where he’d been breeding bread wheats since 1985. Shortly after he arrived, he was presented with a question, did he think bread wheats could ever grow well in this part of the country? Hard wheat is the type of wheat used for bread. Most hard wheat is grown west of the Mississippi, a lower rainfall area than the East Coast and a well-suited environment for this type of wheat. But David Marshall was up for the challenge and he began to breed and trial hard wheat varieties that could withstand the rainfall and humidity of the southeastern United States. In 2008, the first of these bread wheat varieties was released to the public. What this meant was that farmers in the South, who had traditionally grown soft wheats, suitable for biscuits and pie crusts (though a good bit of it sold for animal feed), could now plant wheat for bread.
In the spring of 2008, I made an appointment for a haircut. Although this may seem irrelevant to our narrative, it is in the most unlikely places that signposts appear. Sitting in the waiting area at the salon, I picked up the March 2008 issue of Gourmet from the table in front of me and opened randomly to an image of an ancient brick-and-stone building, with the words SMALL WORLD in large print at the top of the page, followed by, “Is it possible to both resist globalization and profit from it? In Normandy, a handful of local heroes think so—and are proving it with an ancient tradition and a great baguette.” The piece, written by Bill McKibben, was about the revival of a community mill. Within the region of Perche, the town of Nogent-le-Rotrou, population 11,000, supported thirteen bread bakeries, yet all the wheat grown in the surrounding hills was sold as feed for animals. Two Frenchmen, Philippe Gallioz and Jean Larrivìere, connected the dots and took over a four-hundred-year-old mill near the town of Mortagne-au-Perche, forty minutes away from Nogent-le-Rotrou. The flour they produced they called la farine du Perche—a flour milled within the region of Perche from grain grown by local organic farmers. Gallioz explains, “Right from the beginning…our idea was to link the farmer, the miller, and the baker. For centuries that link existed, but in modern times it didn’t. The baker bought his flour from some distant warehouse; the farmer sold his wheat for animal feed; the mill stood idle.” To ensure a market for their flour, they centered their endeavor on the concept of terroir, a French term with no exact English translation, but whose meaning is something to the effect of that the conditions in the place where something is grown—the soil, the air, the climate—are contained within the flavor and essence of that which is grown. In other words, place matters.
Reading this article, I was struck by its relevance to our current circumstances. A couple months later, our bakers’ community converged at a field day in Waynesville, North Carolina, where Dr. Marshall gave a talk and a tour of his trial plots of wheat. Dr. Chris Reberg-Horton from North Carolina State University’s Organic Grains Project spoke about organic grain production. The timing was ideal. Before this point, none of us bakers had dared to change our key ingredient—baking was challenging enough, even with midwestern commodity flour, but the events of 2008 created a ripe moment. The idea of forming direct relationships with North Carolina growers seemed within reach. Our bakers’ community came together again for the first of many meetings to discuss the idea. We envisioned a mill centered upon the idea that place matters: a community mill connecting farmer, miller, and baker, one that was environmentally and economically sustainable, decreasing food miles, and stabilizing pricing. Excitement grew around this idea. I wrote a grant proposal and shared it with our Cooperative Extension Agent who share it with Roland McReynolds, the director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, a nonprofit organization focused on sustainable agriculture and food systems. Roland called me, introduced himself, and explained their efforts over the last few years of working alongside NCSU to promote organic small grains in the state as an economically and ecologically beneficial winter rotation crop for organic growers. He felt that having a baker on the project would help further their mission. Having the voice of the baker meant there would be a market for this crop.
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Alan passed away in January of 2009. His half-page editorial obituary in the New York Times began, “Alan Scott, whose blacksmith’s skill in using radiant heat led to a revival of the ancient craft of building brick ovens, allowing bakers to turn out bread with luxuriously moist interiors and crisp crusts, died Jan. 26 in Tasmania, Australia.” My mentor, a hero for so many of us bakers, was no longer with us.
Alan had called me in the spring of 2008 to tell me of his latest venture. After years of building wood-fired ovens around the world, he’d moved back to his hometown of Oatlands, Tasmania, with a diagnosis of congestive heart failure, but even with his heart pumping at 30 percent capacity, it proved difficult for Alan to actually accept a sabbatical. He’d been in Oatlands for about a year and a half and had begun organizing the bakeries in his region. He told me he’d been speaking with farmers, too. And he’d purchased a huge stone-burr gristmill. Over the months that followed, we emailed back and forth. He told me about the bakers in Tasmania and the mill he’d purchased: “I went ahead and ordered a giant mill from Austria…with 48-inch stones and a capacity of a couple of tons a day. It’s handmade by an old couple and is just beautiful.” Alan was still well when the mill left Austria, but it was sent to Tanzania instead of Tasmania by mistake and had made it as far as Leipzig, Germany, before the error was discovered and the mill rerouted. By the time the ship carrying the mill finally arrived at the port in Hobart, Tasmania, Alan’s health had begun to deteriorate. His daughter, Lila, became the responsible party for the 5,000-pound mill, sitting in a shipping container at the port. After Alan died, she called to tell me she thought my project should use this mill. Even posthumously, Alan was pushing forward the next chapter in bread’s story.
Alan’s mill represented something. It carried the promise, for farmers, of a market for North Carolina–grown grain and, for bakeries, of the potential for truly local bread. It was the link between farmer and baker. After months of phone calls and emails to Australia and Austria and among agencies here in North Carolina—North Carolina State University, Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, the USDA—as well as among seven bakeries in Western North Carolina that had come together through this effort—the mill departed from the port in Hobart.
From Hobart the mill traveled to Melbourne, Australia, where it was placed on a ship bound for Long Beach, California. From Long Beach, it traveled by rail to Charlotte, North Carolina. In Charlotte, it was loaded onto the flatbed roll-back truck, provided by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, that would finally deliver it to Asheville.
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In the spring of 2012, through a community effort of crowdfunding, peer lending, grant awards, and empathetic investors, Carolina Ground was launched, with Alan’s mill as its centerpiece. My focus shifted from concept to reality as my lens narrowed to the craft of milling. I knew, as a baker, that the quality of our flour would outrank its place of origin, and it would be my task to ensure that local and quality became synonymous with the flour we produced. I approached local organic farmers who were growing commodity grain for animal feed to persuade them to grow bread wheat for our mill. Growing this crop would require more from these farmers, and their grain would need to meet higher quality standards, but in exchange, we were slowly creating a niche market for Southern grains. Separately, I engaged the Southern bakers themselves, through group emails and bakery visits, speaking the language we bakers know, of baker’s percentage, hydration, and bulk fermentation, to help them navigate the challenges that our Southern grains could present. I sought to inspire our bakers to interact with their ingredients in ways that they may not have done in the past. I encouraged bakers to share information, their successes and their challenges, so we could learn from each other. This mill would make us better bakers.
La Farm Bakery in Cary, North Carolina, and Flat Rock Village Bakery in Flat Rock, North Carolina, agreed to test-bake grains for the mill, helping us determine which crops we should purchase—assessing gluten strength and tolerance, and mix and fermentation times. Modern mills use machines to test flour and flow charts to assess quality, but we embraced our skills as bakers. Harry Peemoeller, a passionate German baker and senior bread and pastry instructor at Johnson & Wales University’s Charlotte campus, insisted we send him the most challenging flour to work with, so he could engage his students and deepen their understanding of flour. When mistakes were made in the mill room, like running rye over our finest screens or accidentally filling the hopper with rye, pastry wheat, and bread wheat instead of a single type of grain, we turned these mistakes into opportunities. We ran to our kitchens and came up with solutions, making our highly sifted Light Rye flour into shortbread cookies filled with lemon curd and mascarpone cheese (see this page for the recipe), and a Trinity Blend flour that our student intern from Johnson & Wales made into a teacake with lemon thyme glaze (see this page). We then added these flours to our offerings.
Like a chef-driven restaurant, Carolina Ground is a baker-driven mill. Although the mill was born out of need, what transpired in the creation of Carolina Ground was more than we had ever imagined: the mill transformed the quality and kind of baking in our region, impacting not just a handful of bakers in Western North Carolina but a huge community of bakers throughout the Southeast. By working with our flour, these bakeries are revolutionizing the kinds of baked goods they’re delivering to their communities, and the number of these communities is increasing exponentially.
In Atlanta, the Little Tart Bakeshop elevates the Georgia peanut with our stone-ground whole-grain spelt flour in their Salted Peanut Butter Cookies with Cacao Nibs (this page); in New Orleans, Levee Baking Co. pairs the flavor of Louisiana blood orange with our wholegrain pastry flour made from soft red winter wheat in their Rough Puff with Pecan Frangipane and Louisiana Blood Orange (this page); and outside Asheville in Walnut, North Carolina, in the little wood-fired-brick-oven bakery that was once Natural Bridge Bakery and is currently Walnut Schoolhouse, baker Brennan Johnson is teaching baking with our flavor-forward, regional stone-ground flours. Throughout the southeastern United States, a significant number of bakers are engaging with regional stone-ground flours in unique and creative ways. We are inspiring them and they are inspiring us.
Carolina Ground is changing the landscape for our bakers, moving them from industrial commodity flour to cold-stone-milled flour, variety specific, of place, flavor, and character, so they can deliver to their customer extraordinary taste, texture, and story. We are moving our growers from feed-grade to food-grade grains, to richer and more diverse crop rotations, and from a commodity to an agricultural product of distinction. Carolina Ground is an integral part of a burgeoning movement of regional mills popping up nationwide and of bakers engaging on a level that has not been seen before in this country. Through these regional milling endeavors, farmer, miller, baker, and customer are together helping to rebuild a more sustainable food system.
