Stone cold

The world of artisanal cuisine is filled with good intentions and plagued by jargon. Lindsey Schutters decodes the hidden world of the grind

“We grind it and bag it immediately.” That’s the promise Aubrey Terblanche, owner of Gideon Milling and part-time commercial jet pilot, makes for each bag of flour that goes out the door. Though he’s a strong advocate of conservation agriculture and tries to pass on all that care and effort to the consumer, he doesn’t label his product organic.

“The market thinks organic is when you plant the stuff and you leave it. We’re not gonna feed the world like that because you get a small harvest,” he explains. “Now we get into sustainable farming: no-till, back to basics. You saw the benefits of that at AJ’S farm.”

To be clear, Terblanche facilitated the Hanskraal visit because it was at a more convenient time than the farm visit Popular Mechanics first scheduled with Cross Cape Precision. He also sources the bulk of his wheat from the Protem region via the Caledon silos. Although this part of the story is about flour, that end product is only as good as the raw materials.

“Big bakeries call us to complain that our flour is a bit darker than the flour coming out of the super mills. The reason is that it’s coarser because of the stone machine. We don’t grind as fine because that would push the temperature up,” says Terblanche.

Temperature is very important when milling the whole kernel. If the wheat germ is present in the milling process, those fats start to aggressively decompose when reaching about 45º C and that turns the flour rancid. What the super mills do is separate out the germ before the final grind and then rip up the grind to that fine white powder that has proved very marketable.

You’ll find that Gideon mill isn’t much about the marketing, because that costs money that would be better spent improving the quality of the final product. The company doesn’t make a fuss about the fact that each bag is hand packed and hand sealed using workers from the surrounding Bellville South, a community already pushed to the brink with factory closures. It also doesn’t make on-the-bag claims about the numerous health benefits of grinding whole grain, or about how we may all be misunderstanding gluten intolerance.

The science is still largely anecdotal, but there is a growing call for more studies regarding the benefits of retaining the wheat germ. The overall sentiment is that the essential enzymes required to digest the protein in gluten are actually in the germ, along with all the vitamins and minerals standard supermarket breads are enriched with.

It may seem naïve, but I’m even more convinced that Gideon mill has nothing to hide, given the company was willing to stop operations to grant me unprecedented access to the inner workings of a stone mill. There is an unsifted wholewheat flour that the company does in smaller quantities, where everything goes into the bag. It isn’t a very profitable product because of a shorter shelf life and it makes for very flat bread, but it’s a testament to a stated commitment to delivering a wholesome product.

Not all the parts of the kernel make it to the cake flour and white bread flour, but the entire grain enters the grinding stones. The best millstones are Danish and that’s what Gideon uses. The set-up is on the horizontal, with the bottom stone doing the work and the top stone essentially just a board against which the grain is ground. I was expecting precise torque requirements for setting the stones, but it appears that this is is adjusted by feel. If the flour is too coarse, they tighten the screws and vice versa.

Before the grinding comes is a series of agitators, augers and sieves that remove from the grains anything that isn’t wheat. I saw stones, pieces of iron and even some glass in the waste pans.

Let me explain: when a farmer delivers grain to the silo, it goes through a grading process. A sample is tested first by hand sieve to estimate the amount of foreign bodies, then a very fancy machine gives a protein and moisture analysis. Once graded, the load is assigned a silo and the grain is sent along the network of high-speed belts and buckets into the relevant silo where all similar graded grains will go.

There were three men working in the grading office at the silo I visited and sometimes only one will be there to do all the grading. It’s an effective process, no doubt, but a lot of foreign objects come through to the mill.

After the wheat kernel is sorted it makes its way into the grinder. Then, if the company isn’t bagging the wholewheat flour, it makes its way into a sieve. At this point, a baker can specify a mixture and the mill can adjust the bran and semolina quantities.

“The wholewheat flour doesn’t rise well because there’s too much bran, which cuts the glutens,” Terblanche says in somewhat of an oversimplification. “But our company has a purpose beyond profit and offering that product to the market is important because it’s the healthiest possible flour we can make.”

Removing the germ from wheat, like many of the super mills do, is done partially to increase the product shelf life, but mostly because selling it to pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies generates more profit.

“Steel roller mills were introduced in Britain in 1872. In 1876, the birthrate declined. Then the natural loaf became compulsory and within two years the birth rate increased,” he explains. Although I haven’t yet tracked down the study he was quoting, there is an alarming prevalence of birth rate decline among rats in controlled studies using enriched bread.

There’s a glut of science being funded by the Banting brigade that is finding bread to be the root cause of many cancers and syndromes affecting more and more people. None seem to be factoring in artisanal bread baked with stoneground flour.

Terblanche has many stories of gluten-intolerant people who call up to find answers about why bread baked with the company’s flour doesn’t set off the usual reactions. To me, the moral of this story is that when hard work and effort are put into delivering a quality product to the consumer without regard for profit, you’ll usually end up with a good deal.

Artisanal bakers love baking with Gideon flour and the bread tastes amazing. Aubrey Terblanche knows where the bulk of his grain is coming from and has a great relationship with the farmers who produce it. Gideon mill opened its machines to the scrutiny of the Popular Mechanics lens. The science may not be there to support it, yet, but there’s a lot of goodwill and craft in the stoneground flour, which makes for a good loaf.