Flour Alchemy

Above: Photo courtesy of Origin Breads.

In the spring of 2022, I noticed something strange happening in my sourdough starter. It used to have a light, sour aroma with some hints of funk. Now, when I peeled the lid back, I’d get a powerful sickly sweet scent, like fresh apple cider. At first, the scent was intoxicating, but I started to notice some performance issues. My starter wasn’t rising like it normally did, and the breads I leavened with that starter seemed to deflate during the baking process. The culprit: I had recently switched to a local, stoneground rye flour, and it was creating too much enzymatic activity—where enzymes begin to break down complex sugars and can even break protein chains—when paired with the malted flour I had been using in my starter.

“You’re going to have to adjust your starter,” Halee Wepking told me, over the phone. Stone-milling is a simple process where the wheat is ground between two large, heavy stones, processing the bran, germ and endosperm together. Modern milling is usually done on a roller mill, where the bran, germ and endosperm are separated during the milling process. The bran and the germ contain more oils, which can go rancid, which is why they’re usually separated out for commercial flours, but they also contain a lot more nutrition and fuel for a sourdough starter and help kick off enzymatic activity. The flour I had been using, Halee explained, with added diastatic malt, was designed to mimic the enzymatic activity you’d normally find in a stoneground flour. If I were to use more stoneground flour in my bread and starter, I’d likely not need a malted flour to kickstart my fermentation anymore.

Halee and her husband, John, recently took over operation of a stone mill and renamed it after their farm, Meadowlark Organics, dubbing it Meadlowlark Community Mill. “Our goal is to be able to provide more markets for grain crops for other farmers. We buy grain from ten to twelve other farms around the Driftless area, which is one of the reasons why we put the word ‘community’ in our mill’s name.”

Halee explained that their dedication to organically farming small grains, like wheat, rye, spelt and others, are important to the region because these crops help break up weed cycles, require less tilling, and can have regenerative effects on the soil compared to corn and soybeans, two crops that dominate Wisconsin’s farming. But aside from their farming goals, it’s the stone-milling that sets Meadowlark’s flours apart from what you normally see in the store.

The two flours I’d added to my bread-making were Meadowlark’s whole wheat bread flour and their bolted bread flour. Both are blends from various farms that are designed to meet consistent standards during their lab-testing for protein content and other factors. “Bolted” is a term that refers to sifting out the larger bran particles that can act like razors in the dough, cutting gluten strands and destroying the structure of a loaf. It performs closer to a white flour than whole wheat, but still retains some smaller bran particles and the germ, adding more protein and fiber to bread than the average white flour. In order to best use these flours, and to hopefully find a fix for my starter, I reached out to two local bakeries: Origin Breads and Madison Sourdough.

“It was pretty important to me that when I started baking I was producing healthy breads,” said Kirk Smock, founder of Origin Breads. Kirk estimates that 98% of the flour he uses in his bakery is from Meadowlark. Most of the loaves from Origin are made from predominantly whole wheat, along with some bolted flour, and Kirk loves experimenting with the unique, single-variety grain flours that Meadowlark is always developing. The recipe development process can be tricky, but Kirk feels it’s important that the bakers who work at Origin have the chance to experiment and develop new loaves. He also encourages home bakers to incorporate local flours in their breads whenever possible.

“For newer bakers, it’s good to get your rhythm and techniques down with more predictable flour,” Kirk told me, but he thinks the flavor from local, fresh-milled flour can add a lot to a home baker’s loaves. It can be tricky to work with fresh-milled, stoneground flour, though, so Kirk recommends starting with a basic bread recipe and not to get too aggressive with the bread’s hydration percentage, or how much water is added to the recipe compared to the amount of flour. A hydration percentage of 70% (meaning that you would use an amount of water that weighs 70% of the weight of the total flour) is fairly low for modern sourdough recipes, but Kirk suggests that home bakers err on the side of caution with the amount of water they start with, as you can always add more during the early stages of the process.

“Whole-grain flours can be thirstier and absorb more water than white flours,” Kirk explained, “but fresh-milled flour might also have a higher moisture content than commercial flour.” This can lead to doughs actually shedding water during the proofing stages and it’s why Origin always tests their own new recipes with a maximum hydration of 75%, even if most of their established breads push hydration to 80%.

While the different types of new flours can be exciting for a smaller, growing bakery like Origin, consistency is key for Andrew Hutchinson of Madison Sourdough. Andrew Hutchinson purchased Madison Sourdough in 2009, but the business had been in operation since 1994. Eager to incorporate more local flour into their bread, Andrew began working with the mill that Halee and John would eventually take over, but the shift in how the flour behaved from farm to farm created inconsistencies that affected Madison Sourdough’s busy production schedule. He bought a stone mill in 2015 and began sourcing grain directly from Meadowlark’s farm to mill himself.

“I always know when a transition in our grain is coming because the dough feels different, and it’s usually when the grain bins at Meadowlark are transitioning between seasons,” Andrew said. Having control over the milling process lets him navigate those transitions easily. Madison Sourdough produces around 1,000 loaves a day, and a majority of their breads are sourdough loaves produced with natural leavening.

“Any deviation from a regular schedule can really throw things off. If the flour is too variable on a day-to-day basis, then the doughs are too variable. The ingredients to make a loaf of bread are relatively cheap, but the labor is not. If there are any hiccups in production, the margin on a loaf of bread is reduced, and when you’re dealing in scale, that does matter. That’s a huge barrier for local mills to make inroads with bakeries that do large volumes because they don’t want to shake that up,” Andrew explained.

With the introduction of their new mill, Madison Sourdough reorganized their menu to include more whole grains in all of their standard hearth breads, including shuttering the classic sourdough white loaf for the MsCO signature sourdough, which features three different grains that are milled in-house. Andrew also mentioned that having their own mill has allowed them to experiment with cracked grains, which they cook down for various menu items.

His recommendations for bakers taking home bags of their flour are similar to Kirk’s—start with a lower hydration percentage and ease into the process of introducing new flours to your bread.

“You should never be fighting your dough,” Andrew says. “I view bread as the fullest expression of that wheat. The end product is so dramatically different from what it came from, and as a baker, I’m trying to guide that process and not control it. The best loaves shape themselves.”

To resolve my starter woes, I switched my starter to Madison Sourdough’s rye flour, which is a bolted rye and a better pairing for the malted flour I still have to work through. The sweet aroma subsided, my starter began tripling in volume on a regular schedule, and my loaves began developing a deep, rich flavor from the two different wheat flours I added from Meadowlark. In the end, that’s really what matters most: local flours can add depth of flavor. From rich, nutty aromas to assisting in deep caramelization of the crust, experimenting with local flour can change your bread’s flavor profile dramatically. Halee sums it up: “I think something people really value is that fresh-milled, stoneground flour actually tastes like something, and it tastes good!”

Meadowlark’s flours are available at Willy Street Co-op and other stores in the Madison area, and Madison Sourdough sells an array of their fresh-milled flours at their bakery. For people who are interested in tasting these breads without having to bake them, both Origin Breads and Madison Sourdough have retail stores in Madison and their breads can be found in markets around the city.

Sourdough Starter Guide

A new sourdough starter takes a little time to develop, but relies on your flour and water mixture to capture the naturally occurring yeast and bacteria in your home. Rye flour is particularly active and helps boost fermentation, and is an integral part of my sourdough starter. If you use regular All Purpose flour at home, I recommend picking up Meadowlark’s rye flour for your starter, but if you use a malted bread flour, the rye flour from Madison Sourdough won’t create too much enzymatic activity.

To begin:

1. Add 100 grams of water, 50 grams of white flour and 50 grams of rye flour to a tall glass jar or see-through plastic container. Stir well to incorporate. Place a rubber band around the jar at the height of the mixture to track growth. Let sit for 24 hours.

2. At 24 hours, scoop 25 grams of that mixture into a new jar, and add 50 grams of water, 25 grams of white flour, and 25 grams of rye flour. This is a feeding ratio of 1:2:2, or 1 part starter, 2 parts water, 2 parts flour. Let sit for 12 hours. The mixture should start to produce bubbles and begin to grow in height somewhat.

3. At 12 hours, repeat the process of a 1:2:2 feeding, and repeat every 12 hours for 3-4 days. At this point, the mixture should double in size every 12 hours, but some starters need a little more time to develop.

4. Continue this process for a total of 7-10 days before attempting to use the starter as a leavening agent for baking. New starters take time to develop the right balance in the culture, so even if it looks active, it might need more time before it can leaven bread.

5. Once your starter is active, adjust your feeding ratio. If your starter starts to peak and shrink before 12 hours, extend the ratio to 1:3:3 or even 1:4:4. The more starter you use in a feeding, the more active it will be.

Glossary

Sourdough starter:
A mixture of water and flour that begins to ferment from naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria in the air that can be used to leaven breads.

Starter feeding:
The daily process of adding fresh water and flour to a small amount of sourdough starter to allow the yeast to feed and to keep it active enough to leaven bread.

Levain:
An offshoot of your starter fed specifically to be added into a bread dough.

Diastatic malt:
A powder made from ground barley with a naturally occurring enzyme intact.

Enzymatic activity:
A process in which enzymes break down starches into sugars that can feed the yeast and trigger a faster rise.

Hydration:
The amount of water added to a bread dough, usually notated in a percentage of the total flour used, i.e. 75% hydration for 1000g of flour would be 750g of water.

Oven Spring:
The amount the dough rises, or “springs,” during baking.

Crumb:
The interior cross section of the bread, marked with the air bubbles that expanded during the bake.

Resources

Theperfectloaf.com
An encyclopedic blog of sourdough knowledge

Fullproofbaking.com / IG @fullproofbaking
Starter kits, supplies and tutorials

Flour Power by Tara Jensen
A book all about how to use a variety of grains