Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains

INTRODUCTION

Before I say anything else, I should probably reveal my sole reason for writing this book: Food made with freshly milled flour is better for your health, the environment, and flavor. I want everyone to start using it.

Cooking and baking with freshly milled flour is a real passion and has become a significant part of what fuels me as a chef. One of the greatest aspects of working with food is that if you listen to the ingredients, they will tell you how to use them. I don’t mean this in some wacky, whimsical way, but in the most practical sense. If you pick up an apple and it’s underripe, use its texture to your advantage: slice it thinly and toss it in a salad. Give an overripe apple over to its natural evolution and mash it into jam or bake it into a pie. And if it’s perfectly ripe, just take a bite. I’m a firm believer that ingredients should dictate the menu, not the cook preparing it. I apply the same reasoning to wheat. Red Fife and other hard wheat varieties are adapted for making big, airy loaves of bread, while soft wheats like Sonora, which was historically and famously used to make super large tortillas in the Mexican state of Sonora, are best for pastries and cakes. Some wheat varieties are all-around performers and can do almost anything, but it’s up to the baker or cook to coax and tame their versatile characteristics.

It is so personally rewarding for me to introduce people to how good freshly milled flour is and how it can be harnessed. Seeing someone’s face light up when they try a slice of my fresh-milled durum sourdough bread, or hearing that they feel nourished from eating a whole wheat croissant I have baked—that’s what drives me.

If you’re skeptical, remember that it wasn’t so long ago that buying organic food was considered highbrow and unnecessary. I remember early in my career seeing a celebrated chef yell at his sous-chef for buying organic vegetables because they were considerably more expensive. At the time, his frustration seemed rational. But before long, opinions changed, and a greater knowledge and understanding led us to accept that buying chemical-free produce was responsible food sourcing and the right thing to do for our bodies.

I’m a chef. I feed people. The word restaurant derives from the French to restore to a former state, and I feel strongly that if people trust me with their time, money, and calories, I have a duty to nourish them to the best of my abilities. I am also an enthusiastic teacher and I love to share recipes and techniques with home cooks and professionals alike, so I am excited to share my approach to using flour with you. Throughout this book, we will explore the wonderful world of milling, how to source grains for milling at home, and how to approach purchasing fresh flour directly from a mill. We’ll get into the intricacies of working with fresh flour, and discuss how the characteristics of different grains work alone or in unison to create flavor and structure for bread, pasta, pizza, and pastry. With its collection of simple and adaptable recipes that highlight just how good true whole-grain cooking and baking can be, I hope this book changes the way you think about cooking and ingredients for good.

Food made with freshly milled flour is better for your health, the environment, and flavor.

THE STATE OF GRAIN

MY JOURNEY TO FRESHLY MILLED FLOUR

Over a career that has spanned twenty years, I have been fortunate enough to work with some very experienced and generous people. Many of them helped illuminate a whole new culinary approach for me. These lessons, learned throughout my time in the restaurant business, have resulted in a continuing journey into the exploration of whole grains and milling. Here’s how I got to where I am now.

GROWING UP

My mom grew up in a town in upstate New York with a population of 6,000 people. She made her own clothes, hunted for her food, and milled her own flour. In other words, she is a complete badass. That era was the 1980s and whole, organic foods were in fashion, but so were kitchen appliances. Home milling wasn’t super unusual. She would make dough with her freshly milled flour, pop it in a bread machine, and this delicious loaf would come out. I thought it was magic. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her and with other members of my family.

When I was fourteen, I got my first job at the Italian Heritage Center, a members-only club in Portland, Maine. It was a huge place with multiple banquet halls, all named after Italian heroes like Columbus and Galileo. It was the ideal spot for a young and inexperienced Italian American kid like me to learn the ropes of the restaurant business. And it was endlessly entertaining seeing all these Italian New Englanders with thick Maine accents scarfing down spaghetti and meatballs as if they were in the old country. The food was your standard Italian American fare featuring the greatest hits like veal piccata, lemon chicken, and eggplant Parmesan. We made all the classics. From the moment I started in the kitchen, I was obsessed.

After four years at the Heritage Center—and after graduating from high school—I needed to find a job that paid me more than seven bucks an hour. A cook I knew there offered to get me a gig with his dad working on a ferryboat. The line served Casco Bay, shuttling people and cargo from the Portland mainland to the surrounding islands.

I loved being on the water every day, and the deckhand banter was even more of a sport than cooking, but despite the significant increase in wages, it wasn’t long before I missed being around food. While still working on the ferry, I took a part-time job at Henry VIII, a very popular spot that specialized in a variety of roast beef sandwiches. Each day I would prep forty pounds of top round beef that would cook overnight, low and slow at 140°F, in an Alto-Shaam oven. As simple as the concept was, the preparations were diverse, and before long I was learning how to make hollandaise sauce, mushroom ragù, soups, and chutneys.

The owner, Bruce Rascher, was an interesting dude. He had been raised in France, attended hotel school in Switzerland, and cooked all over the world. To this day I have no idea why he opened a sandwich shop in Portland—he was a properly trained restaurateur and could have made it anywhere. I owe Bruce so much for my appreciation of food, and for encouraging me to go to culinary school. He had a connection at The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia, and after one phone call and Bruce’s letter of recommendation, I was on my way.

PHILADELPHIA TO ITALY…AND BACK

I began culinary school in early 2004 with classes five days a week from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. I arrived feeling pretty confident in the kitchen, but I quickly realized I had a lot to learn. Yes, I made a mean chicken parm, but I had absolutely no idea about anything other than the dishes I’d cooked at my first two jobs.

Knife skills, building sauces, butchering meats, and the basic etiquette of working in a kitchen brigade were all disciplines I would soon employ. I was gaining an essential culinary vocabulary that would be a requirement if I wanted to land a job in a city kitchen, which I ultimately did: Barclay Prime, Striped Bass, Le Bec-Fin, and the Fountain Restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel—all in Philadelphia.

After having cooked in these top joints and honed my culinary chops, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for becoming part of the Philly restaurant scene. Wanting to impress my girlfriend at the time, I made a reservation at a place called Vetri. I was curious about this tiny spot on Spruce Street that had gained national attention by being named the best Italian restaurant in the country by Alan Richman, the intensely selective critic of GQ magazine.

Vetri more than lived up to all the hype; it exceeded my expectations. I still can remember the two dishes that floored me: One was an asparagus flan with a suspended runny egg yolk in the center. It was light yet sultry and decadent. Then there was chestnut fettuccine with wild boar ragù and cocoa. I almost fell out of my chair, it was so good. Who was this Marc Vetri guy and what was this food I was eating? It certainly was way different from the meals I had cooked at the Italian Heritage Center! I asked for a job on the spot. Awaiting the answer was more nerve-racking than any date!

I jumped in headfirst, but it was a culture shock to say the least, and a true test. Up until that point, I had cooked only in high-volume restaurants that were all about the mise en place, where each dish was portioned out and prepared with expedience in mind. Vetri, on the other hand, was what we in the industry call al momento, with each and every dish made from scratch, start to finish. A turbot with potato torta? We would fillet the whole fish on the spot, peel the spuds then and there, and make the dish from beginning to end. Even the herbs were chopped to order. It was all so new to me and I just couldn’t understand how to cook this way, but after about two months I started to get it together and somehow managed to survive this baptism by fire. Before long, I actually began to enjoy this new kamikaze style of cooking.

Instead of spending the first half of the day prepping and setting up stations, now I was baking bread, making petit fours and chocolates, and preparing a variety of salumi. Each and every day all the kitchen staff were wearing the hats of the baker, pastry chef, and salami maker. It was awesome.

My total ignorance of pastry allowed me to develop the majority of my skills in the kitchen.

I learned very early on that all cooking disciplines in the kitchen are equally important. You can’t be a great sauté cook and not know how to butcher a fish. Whether it’s cleaning vegetables, breaking down a pig, rolling dough, or mopping the floor, it is essential to be complete and consistent in every area. It is this understanding that has given me a less stereotypical approach to working with fresh flour. It has helped me view the craft of baking differently, too. Since I hadn’t spent years tucked away in a restaurant pastry department, or doing the morning grind at a pâtisserie, my total ignorance of pastry allowed me to develop the majority of my skills in the kitchen and on the fly.

After two years at Vetri, an identity crisis set in. I realized that my creativity and inspiration always came from what I ate at home and what I ate at restaurants. I knew how to cook, but I didn’t know how to create something original. My chefs, Brad Spence and Jeff Michaud, were so successful and accomplished. What did I have to contribute? As much as I was learning from them, the idea of cooking Italian food without ever having been to Italy weighed on me. I needed to experience it for myself.

At this time I was reading a book called Piano, Piano, Pieno: Authentic Food from a Tuscan Farm by Susan McKenna Grant that detailed her life running an agriturismo, a working farm with tourist accommodations. The book was an inspiring collection of recipes that also described a sustainable life on her farm, where she reared animals, worked the land, and ran a guesthouse. To my surprise her email address was in the book, and I decided to reach out. I was amazed when within days she responded with an invitation to come work for her in Tuscany.

I told Marc of my intentions and offered as long a notice as he would need to fill my position at the restaurant. As his sous-chef, leaving wasn’t something I took lightly. But, as any great mentor would do, he gave me great advice. He said as life-changing as working on Susan’s farm in Italy might be, I would learn more as a chef if I cooked in a serious restaurant there instead. He told me he knew just the place. So at age twenty-six I was on my way to Bergamo, Italy, to work at Osteria della Brughiera. My time there was a revelation from the start. As any young Italian American cook might, I became fully intoxicated by the country itself. But more than that, I found myself learning daily lessons from professionals who were not only serious about their craft but also incredibly practiced and disciplined. These guys were carrying on traditions in the right way, the best way, and the way generations had been doing it before them. Everything they taught me—how to shape pasta, how to make a real panettone, even how to pull a perfect cappuccino—set a course for me that has been invaluable.

I loved Bergamo and had every intention of staying there. My Italian was getting good, and I loved the laid-back yet dynamic lifestyle. But then I got a call from Marc Vetri. He asked me if I was interested in coming back to Philly and taking a position as chef de cuisine. He was revamping the restaurant and wanted me to collaborate with him. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Before long I was back stateside, plotting and planning with Marc on how we could make Vetri even better. We wanted it to be not just a fine-dining place for Philadelphians, but rather the type of spot that would stand up nationally and hold its own with any Italian restaurant in New York and beyond. The first thing we decided was to turn Vetri from à la carte dining into a serious tasting-menu-only destination restaurant. With only thirty seats, we felt we had a real opportunity to make it a true culinary showcase. Mirroring Osteria della Brughiera, everything we did was handmade and we were committed to constant improvement.

For the first time ever, I felt that the noodle could be—should be—the star of the show in a pasta dish.

Our hard work paid off. In 2012 Vetri was named a James Beard Foundation Award finalist for Outstanding Restaurant, Travel + Leisure named us among the Best Italian Restaurants in the United States, and I was named one of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 professionals in the food and wine industry. Now we were cooking! In spite of all these accolades, working at Vetri taught me never to rest on my laurels and I continued to learn as much as I could, especially through books. During my second year as chef de cuisine, I read Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli, the legendary California chef and Chez Panisse alum. I had been making pasta all along, but after reading his book, I couldn’t get his words about milling grain out of my mind. I was haunted in the best way by romantic notions of Old World cooking. Eventually I went to Fante’s, a hundred-year-old kitchen shop in South Philly’s historic Italian Market, and bought a small mill for the restaurant. It scared me, mainly because it seemed like an ancient machine that might be too difficult to master. But I started experimenting, and before long I was milling flour every day.

From the very start I was amazed by the results. The fresh flour I was making for pasta was good enough to eat raw, and for the first time ever, I felt that the noodle could be—should be—the star of the show in a pasta dish, with the sauce playing the supporting role. As inspired as I was,