FRESH FLOUR CAN’T BE BEAT
Food made with the just-milled ingredient has ‘tremendously more exciting flavour’
Baking and cooking with freshly milled flour changes everything. Full of flavour and character, a reflection of craft and terroir, it stands in stark contrast to the status quo.
We may be used to conventional flour — a shelf-stable product of nebulous origins and attributes — but the virtues of the alternative are obvious upon first bite.
When stone-milled from whole grains and used fresh, flour shifts from being a glossed-over staple to singular ingredient.
In the face of retail flour shortages, people have been turning to small commercial stone mills like never before.
Countertop grain mills and attachments for stand mixers, such as Mockmill and Komo, are sold out at retailers across the country.
Buying freshly milled flour, or the means to make it yourself, is a practical move given the present circumstances. But it’s a choice that brings intangible benefits at all times, not just trying ones.
Food made with freshly milled flour has “tremendously more exciting flavour,” Adam Leonti says, and is a major source of inspiration for him as a chef.
“I want everyone to start using it,” he writes in Flour Lab (with Katie Parla).
In his debut cookbook, Leonti provides a resource for making and cooking with fresh flour. As true for flour as it is for coffee, he says, freshness is inextricable from flavour.
Industrial flour is as far apart from fresh as pre-ground coffee is from its newly milled counterpart. They share the same source, but offer disparate experiences.
“If you grind coffee beans to order, like more or less every espresso shop in the world, it’s such a massive difference. It’s not a small difference,” Leonti says.
At his New York restaurant Sofia’s, he makes bread, pasta and pizza using hand-milled organic flour. At the beginning of the pandemic, unable to source whole grains, he fell back on flour from a local mill.
Having been a fresh flour proponent since he bought his first mill in the early 2010s as chef de cuisine at Vetri in Philadelphia, he took it as a reminder.
“It’s not even half as flavourful,” he says. “It still goes through the same process of oxidizing.”
Industrial flour is made using roller mills, which grind wheat berries at high speed and volume. The process produces a “practically inert” flour stripped of parts of the grain: the bran (fibrous outer layer, which is reintroduced to make conventional whole-wheat flour) and germ (holder of fat, flavour and nutrients). What’s left, in the case of white flour, is crushed endosperm (the third main component of a grain’s anatomy).
In contrast, stone-milled flour contains all three principal parts of the wheat berry. Here lies the perishability — when the oils in the germ are exposed to air during milling, they begin to oxidize.
With whole-grain flour, as with coffee, fresh is best. In order to preserve both its flavour and nutrition, only mill or buy as much flour as you need, Leonti recommends, and store any excess in a sealed container in the fridge or freezer.
Leonti emphasizes that although provenance is important, grains — dry and shelf-stable in their whole state — ship well.
And while wheat is grown in many places, some regions are known as breadbaskets for good reason.
“The world knows Manitoba as the place for wheat,” he says. “Everyone I worked with in Italy used Manitoba flour. So if they just switched from using Manitoba flour to using Manitoba grain and then milling it themselves, now they’re going to have the best of both worlds.”
With chapters devoted to bread, pasta, pizza, cookies and cakes, Leonti developed all the recipes in Flour Lab with and for freshly milled, whole-grain flours.
Ideally, he writes, you would mill the flour immediately before making the recipe, using organic (or biodynamic) wheat berries.
Whether you’re buying grains to mill at home or freshly milled flour, he includes advice for getting the best. Depending on where they were grown and their type, grains can have vastly different characteristics.
To help guide grain choices, Leonti provides an overview of the wheat varieties (for example, winter versus spring, hard versus soft) and species (for example, ancient grains like einkorn and spelt) he uses in the book.
He chose the grains for their availability, and the recipes he developed had to fit one key criterion. They had to be “craveable,” he says.
Recipe reprinted from Flour Lab. Published by Clarkson Potter.
POTATO GNOCCHI DOUGH
Serves: 6-8
■ 2 lb (about 900 g) potatoes
(I use half Idaho and half Yukon Gold)
■ 2 1/2 cups (625 ml) rye flour, plus more for dusting
■ 3 eggs, beaten
■ 1 1/2 cups (375 ml) finely grated Parmigiano-reggiano 1 1/2 tbsp (22 ml) sea salt
■ Semolina (see note), for dusting
1. Place the potatoes in a medium pot and cover with cold water.
Salt the water and bring to a boil over medium-low heat. Cook until the potatoes are fork-tender, 40 minutes to 1 hour.
2. Drain the potatoes and peel them while they are still hot. Pass the potatoes through a ricer and then press them directly onto a work surface.
3. Distribute 2 cups (500 ml) of the flour, eggs and cheese evenly over the potatoes and season with the salt. With a bench scraper, cut the ingredients just until they come together.
4. If the dough seems too wet, add the remaining flour, 2 tbsp (30 ml) at a time. (You may not need all the flour.) Knead the dough with your hands until the flour and egg are incorporated, about 15 seconds.
5. With a bench scraper, cut off a 5-oz (150-g) piece of dough, keeping the remaining dough covered with a clean kitchen towel.
6. Working from the centre outward on a surface lightly dusted with rye flour, roll the dough to form a 1 1/2-inch (3.75-cm) thick cord; then cut the cord into equal bite-size pieces.
7. Dust with semolina and set aside on a platter. Repeat with the remaining dough.
8. The gnocchi will keep, uncovered, for 2 days in the refrigerator or, wrapped in plastic wrap, for up to a month in the freezer.
9. To cook the gnocchi, bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Salt the water. When the salt has dissolved, add the gnocchi in batches and cook until they float, about 3 minutes. 10. Drain and set them aside on a plate. Serve with your choice of sauce (a brown butter option follows).
Note: Semolina is a coarse grind of durum wheat that is often used for dusting peels or kitchen towels used to wrap pasta dough.
BROWN BUTTER
Serves: 4-6
■ 8 1/2 tbsp (125 ml) unsalted butter
■ Sea salt
■ 1/4 cup (60 ml) finely grated Parmigiano-reggiano
1. Heat the butter in a medium skillet over medium heat until it has browned, 6-8 minutes. Remove the skillet from the heat, add the drained gnocchi to the skillet and swirl gently to coat. Season with salt to taste.
2. Serve immediately, sprinkling each portion with some Parmigiano-reggiano. In this recipe, the dish was garnished with fried sage leaves.