Here at Baker’s Field Flour and Bread, we fire up our flour mill around 4am and then usually mill for the next 7 to 10 hours. On average, we mill around 900 pounds of flour a day. The baker scaling flour for the next day’s dough mix uses flour milled just hours before it’s scaled -- sometimes it’s even still warm from the mill! Our packaging team starts scooping and weighing flour late in the morning, again using flour milled that day. When we say fresh flour, we mean fresh flour.
As you (hopefully!) know, we sell flour directly to our customers through many of the local food co-ops and our online shop. For bulk flour orders, we are also happy to offer pick-up from the bakery. But today I’d like to focus on the restaurants who buy flour from us. We feel lucky to have these partners who value our local, fresh product -- we are also in awe of how skillfully they use our flour.
At Spoon and Stable in the North Loop in Minneapolis, Executive Chef Christopher Nye says he uses Baker’s Field flour because “It’s the freshest flour we can get our hands on….the fresher the flour, the better the flavor.” He also values local: “We are big on sourcing locally and since all of the grains you mill are from the Dakota's or Minnesota, that gives us great pride in knowing that we are support the local community.”
The restaurant uses our sifted Bolles flour in their pasta. Says Chris, “One of the biggest challenges in pasta making is texture. That is why you see so much pasta made with Durum wheat. Durum wheat has a very high percentage of protein, somewhere around 13%. Now finding organic durum (we only use organic grains) is very challenging. We discovered Bolles wheat and have now become very dependent on it as a source of proteins in our pasta doughs.”
In addition to pasta, Spoon and Stable also makes daily bread with Baker’s Field flour. They also use the middlings we remove from the wheat when we are sifting flour. Every day, we have anywhere from 50 to 150 pounds of middlings. Spoon & Stable uses these middlings as you would cornmeal to make their EPI bread, which is a baguette cut into a shape that resembles a wheat stalk.
The Bachelor Farmer in the North Loop is another regular customer. They bake with our whole grain flour in their naturally leavened house bread. You’ll find our sifted flour in their ham and cheese and chocolate croissants and blueberry scones. The Pastry Chef at The Bachelor Farmer, Emily Marks, says that the flour “pairs well with the flavors of the other ingredients and adds a more hearty background flavor to the pastries.”
Of course, many other restaurants in town order our flour. If you’re interested in a complete list, visit our website. We’d love if you continued to support these establishments that believe in supporting local. In the meantime, thank you for reading and loving fresh flour as much as we do!
--Baker Hannah