The Home-Baking Revolution

The wheat farmers and mill manufacturers who are Making America Healthy Again with fresh bread.

By Brad Pearce, who writes “The Wayward Rabbler” substack.

Bread has always been the ultimate symbol of civilization. Its production represents cooperation, stability, and planning—that you will be alive to harvest your wheat, that you will be there tomorrow to bake the dough you’ve started the night before. It combines the ancient four elements: grain comes up from the earth and is crushed by stone; it is blended with water; yeast from the air brings more air into the dough; and it is hardened with fire. In his influential text The Cottage Economy, the early 19^th century British journalist William Cobbett wrote, “Without bread, all is misery. The Scripture truly calls it the staff of life: and it may be called, too, the pledge of peace and happiness in the labourer’s dwelling.” 

It is for all of these reasons that bread is a common euphemism for money. Unfortunately, perhaps like our money, over decades we have let the bread that sustains us become a shadow of itself in our ignorance and complacency and in the name of progress. Now, home bakers, farmers, and small businesses across the country are working to change that by bringing back fresh, high-quality flour to families across America.

At its heart, bread is a simple thing. All one has to do is mix flour with water, add some yeast or sourdough starter and salt, mix it, knead it, give it time to rise, and throw it in an oven; all of these are not even required for all breads. It is quite forgiving, and whatever you produce doing this is likely to taste good, though one can endlessly perfect this art. The Industrial Revolution greatly reduced the number of people who knew the art of bread making, as the public moved to tenements that commonly lacked an oven. Like so many things, bread became a product of artisans, then factories. 

In America in particular, bread was commodified on an enormous scale, and a standalone bakery that isn’t in a supermarket is today a somewhat niche business. Americans became accustomed to breads designed for sweetness and shelf-stability. For example, while it is legally mandated in France that what is called “French bread” can only have four ingredients, even among home bakers in America a simple bread can have seven ingredients (generally adding oil, dairy, and a sweetener). 

The problem is that American bread is stuffed with everything to the extent that it will hardly rot in the bag. While it may taste good, something like Wonder Bread isn’t particularly different from the dough which makes a Twinkie, more of a confection than a healthful meal. Though breads billed as nutritious have become more popular, many aren’t substantively different from white bread, perhaps decorated with seeds but still so stuffed with preservatives as to have an incredible shelf life.

Home-baking is a great and enjoyable activity and will surely remove additives from your diet, but the selection of flour at grocery stores can be dismal. The store brand flour and the more expensive kind found in stores are likely the same low-quality product. Such flour has generally been stripped of everything and then “enriched” to be able to say it is nutritious. It will taste better than store bread, but is it really a healthy and wholesome product?

This question led me to seek an interview with Sara Mader, who runs Palouse Brand, a company that sells grains and legumes directly to consumers. Palouse Brand was started in 2009 and its great innovation was applying modern inventory management techniques to agricultural products. Sara had married into one of the major farming families in her region, and some years earlier her father-in-law had bought a processing plant in Palouse, Washington. Sara came to the business after a career in the tech sector. 

“I felt like people wanted to know things about their food that they couldn’t figure out,” she says. “With my tech background, I could code enough that I could tell them about their food and create that direct-to-consumer experience.” 

They were early adopters of QR code technology, allowing consumers to see the field their grain came from simply by scanning the package. Modern farm equipment is almost all GPS-equipped, so a combine can track where it has been just as a person might trace their jogging route and transfer that data to the truck, then to the processing plant, and on to the bag until it is shipped to your door. Using such a system, every bag that Palouse Brand ships allows consumers to look up things like pictures of the field of origin and various production statistics.

To understand how revolutionary Palouse Brand was, you have to know more about the American, and global, agricultural system. Farming, like most of the rest of the economy, has become ever larger and less personal, particularly since reforms to U.S. farm policy in the 1970s under the influential Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, who preferred food cheapness to quality and was known for telling farmers to “get big or get out.” This supercharged the already existing commodities system by which the great majority of dry agricultural goods are managed. Commodities are goods that are graded and considered of equal value regardless of where they are produced on the premise that once the good is graded it is the same as the rest of the type and grade. Even in the country’s top farming regions, everyone is eating grain from everywhere instead of the crops they watch grow all season. It’s obvious why this system is necessary for exporting to Asia or to trade the barley that goes into a can of beer, but it erases the link between farmer and consumer.

“I wanted people to be able to support American farmers, keep our products domestic,” Sara says. “I wanted to create a direct connection from the farm to the consumer but with a Nordstom’s-style customer service.” In short, she used modern technology to recreate a relationship to our food that had been to be severed with the rise of industrialization. 

Palouse Brand is a vertically integrated company in charge of the whole process, she explains. “We developed the brand, grew the food, cleaned it, bagged it, and as a result of going direct-to-consumer we’ve been able to modify farming practices based on the customer feedback.” This allows for enormous transparency for concerned consumers. One of the most important practices changed due to customer feedback is going glyphosate-free, something generally impossible for farmers to benefit from unless they go for a full “Organic” certification and thus change the grain’s classification within the commodity system—an arduous and years-long process. The mainstream scientific consensus is that glyphosate is safe in the levels that occur in food, but many consumers disagree, and since Palouse Brand sells directly to consumers, it has an incentive to respond to that demand.

From the moment she started selling on Amazon, with bags stored in a cabinet under her steps, Palouse Brand was an instant success with customers. Sales doubled every month until the shipping part of the business needed its own space. It has only continued to grow. I ask if she has been insulated from the impacts of the current uncertainty regarding tariffs, being an American producer who sells domestically. She says the increased interest in American products has made them busier than ever.

I ask how Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative has impacted the brand. She says, “People are looking more at foods they can prepare, versus not knowing what the ingredients are, or looking away from dyes. Every time someone talks about that type of stuff, people start looking into it and find us.” Though other brands have tried to imitate the success of Palouse Brand and provide consumers more information, so far according to her none have been able to match Palouse Brand as a company that controls the product from when it is planted to when it is shipped to your door.

The main thing I wanted to ask Sara was about her sales of stoneground flour. As it turns out, this is a fairly small part of their business. Instead, something much more interesting is going on: Customers are making their own flour from whole wheat berries. 

There are multiple ways to do this. Palouse Brand is partnered with a company called Nutrimill that produces a countertop electric flour mill. This impressive little device can take whole wheat berries and give you the world’s freshest flour at home in a matter of minutes. The ones I was shown were of the classic design, which looks like a conventional modern appliance similar to a fancy food processor, though they produce one with a wood exterior for a more traditional appearance. Nutrimill, a Utah-based company, designs its mills in the United States and has models manufactured in South Korea as well as others assembled in America with granite millstones imported from Germany. Home milling is the most popular option for Palouse Brand customers who bake with the products.

To learn more about how technology is changing our relationship to bread, my wife and I head across the state to Washington State University’s Breadlab in Burlington, which is described on its website as a “combination think tank/baking laboratory.” 

The Breadlab is situated on the edge of town in what has become something of a “grain district” since the lab was founded—featuring artisan bakeries, breweries, and other related businesses. We are given a tour by Janine Sanguine, the lab’s enthusiastic Outreach Manager, who had just come in from planting barley because at this small foundation everyone does a bit of everything. Though it is associated with a state university, the Breadlab is largely self-funding and relies on fundraising and corporate partnerships, most of all with King Arthur Baking Company, which teaches baking classes on site.

The Breadlab’s founding director, Dr. Stephen Jones, was a long-time USDA wheat breeder at WSU’s main Pullman campus who got the idea to help smaller-scale farmers instead of continuing to breed for major wheat producing regions such as the Palouse and Kansas. When he arrived in Burlington, near WSU’s Mount Vernon research station, the first thing that farmers told him was that they were only growing wheat as a rotation crop and generally at best breaking even. Though there has been great progress in wheat breeding, including at WSU, which is situated in one of the country’s premier wheat regions, modern wheat is not bred for a cooler, wetter climate such as western Washington. Further, it isn’t reasonable for the smaller-scale producers in that region to compete with the enormous farms of less populated areas in the commodities markets. That changes if they can grow and sell local varieties of wheat to consumers and small businesses.

The Breadlab, which only works with organic grain and whole grain flour, does about everything you can imagine relating to bread, from breeding, growing, and studying wheat to test baking to public outreach. According to an infographic on the wall, 98% of Americans do not consume enough whole grains based on government standards. One of the nutritionists says those standards are quite low.

The response to the Breadlab’s work has been enthusiastic, with many popular public events featuring area bakers or educational group activities. One particularly interesting activity is pizza nights where the public can come, bring their own toppings if they choose to, make their own dough, and fully prepare and bake their own pizza in the lab’s woodfired pizza oven. Thirty years ago, Kramer’s friends thought he was crazy when he came up with this idea on Seinfeld, but it turns out that now people really do want to make their own pizza pie.

The Breadlab also advocates home milling and was able to demonstrate lovely countertop machines from the Austrian company KoMo. These mills are encased in wood with interlocking panels, similar in appearance to the Nutrimill Harvest line of American-assembled countertop mills. Of greater interest is their commercial machine called the New American Stone Mill. This mill splits the difference between countertop mills and the enormous industrial mills of the “Big Ag” system. This imposing piece of machinery was designed by Andrew Heyn, who runs a wood-fired bakery in Elmore, Vermont. Andrew decided to create these mills after he was dissatisfied with the quality of mills commercially available and, with the American pioneer spirit, decided to make his own. 

New American Stone Mills are hand manufactured in Vermont with millstones quarried from the state’s famed Barre Gray Granite. Made with an easy to source motor and commonly available parts, everything about the mill is easily repairable, besides the stone, which will last for “generations” if properly cared for. They also sell connectable sifters, for those who want to separate the finer and coarser parts of the flour, which is necessary for recipes that require white flour. Their website does not list a price, but it is clear that this quality product is a major equipment investment that could stay with a business for perhaps over 100 years, encouraging a lasting tradition of baking with fresh flour. The business offers the service of sending the creator to new install locations to set up the machine and train the proud new owner.

While New American Stone Mills primarily markets the product to bakeries, it can also be a boon to small farmers who hope to maximize the value of their acreage. Farmers can make and bag their own flour and sell it at a farm store or farmer’s market, thereby getting a much higher price per bushel of grown wheat by putting more of their own labor and capital into it. Making smaller scale agriculture viable has been challenging under federal policies that encourage massive farms, so adding value is always important. You can be sure that many of the millions of Americans who shop at farmers markets would be delighted to buy fresh flour from a farmer face-to-face, and many bakeries that may not have the space or capital to grind their own flour would greatly benefit from access to the farm’s flour in bulk quantities.

Having finished our tour of the facility, Janine sends me home with some fresh flour from one of their test varieties to try it for myself. Generally, for taste and texture, one may modify a recipe for whole flour or use a mix of whole and white. This is even more true with fresh-milled flour, a quite different product from what’s in the store, which may be several months old. However, I thought using as normally as possible was the best way to get the proper experience and compare it to other flours.

The first thing we made was pizza from a recipe my mother-in-law wanted to show me for a whole hydration dough. While the crust did not crisp up in her woodfired pizza oven as she had hoped, the taste was remarkable. I certainly had no complaints about our dinner.

Then I wanted to try making sourdough loafs from this natural flour, which I had been told was somewhat different to work with. Traditionally, the parts included in what we call whole flour, bran and germ, are removed from fine flour and used for animal feed. Modern breeding has massively increased the percent of a grain made up of the endosperm, the part which makes white flour, so in the nineteenth century a whole flour would have had a quite different composition. 

My interest in trying this was due to widespread anecdotal reports that many people who are gluten intolerant can digest traditional sourdough bread made from stone-ground flour (gluten intolerance refers to digestive problems from eating gluten and is different from celiac disease, a potentially deadly wheat allergy). There are many theories behind this. The most plausible is that the fermentation and rising process means sourdough bread is already partially digested by yeast by the time a human consumes the bread. In contrast, almost all store-bought bread is quick-rising, and even the “sourdough” you buy at the store is more accurately “sourdough flavored.” It commonly has vital wheat gluten as an additive, making the gluten one consumes in a substantially different state than a sourdough that has aged for 16 to 24 hours.

I set about making my bread from fresh, whole-grain flour as I usually would, except for heeding Sara’s advice that it generally takes a bit more water. My dough came out a bit shaggy, but with proper time rose impressively, so I folded and rolled it into loaves and put them on my baguette pan. The end result wasn’t much to look at, and I must admit it tasted like “health food,” but I was able to quite easily make a hearty and wholesome bread much different from anything I have had before. My wife, who is gluten intolerant, ate quite a lot, perhaps over-indulging at the chance to eat wheat. Not only did she not get sick, but we both felt wonderful the next day, almost as if we had been properly nourished for the first time. It must be added that the bit of crust that stuck to my pan because my dough was too sticky broke off and made the best cracker I have ever had.

Is it reasonable, in our busy society, to bring back home bread making with fresh ground flour? Americans probably don’t want to plant their own wheat fields and beat out the flour by hand, but we are seeing something remarkable where technology has brought fresh and personal flour back to us as easily as getting it delivered to your door and filling a bowl from a small appliance. It does cost more than a five-pound bag of store-brand flour. A cheaper counter-top mill is generally around $300, while a five-pound bag of Palouse Brand wheat is $20. But there is also a high cost to cheap food—to you, the environment, and the economy. In the bigger picture, our bad diets are costing America enormous amounts in terms of obesity, medical care, absenteeism due to sickness, and premature death. And baking homemade bread is one of the great joys of life, for those who enjoy the hobby and for those who enjoy the results.

While Big Ag and processed food are still king in America, the winds are shifting. I know that demand for quality fresh flour outstrips the supply because all of the companies I looked into for this article are operating at maximum capacity. When I called Palouse Brand to set up an interview, the phone message said customer support was by email only because the customer support staff were working on the floor due to high demand; callers were encouraged to apply for a job. Public events at the Breadlab sell out in minutes. You might wait for months to get into a King Arthur Baking School class. On the website Pleasant Hill Grain, which sells Nutrimills, KoMos, and other similar products, almost all home mills are out of stock and they suggest pre-ordering. The wait time for a New American Stone Mill is generally a few months after putting down a deposit.

Americans from all walks of life want to improve their lives with healthy bread from fresh flour, presenting a big opportunity for American farmers, artisans, and entrepreneurs to get into the business of supplying this wholesome demand. There is a home-milling and home-baking revolution going on in America, and it has the potential to make us all live healthier and happier lives from something as basic as eating better bread.