Archives

It needn’t actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven.

All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.

There’s a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.

Perhaps there’s more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.

A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!

St Anthony Falls powered the sawmills that created the financial capital that laid the foundations for General Mills.

Samson was grinding. He wasn’t pressing. No matter what some artists may think.

A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more.

Ferragosto and the Feast Day of the Assumption of Mary; connected, perhaps, by a sheaf of wheat.

Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you get by grinding the grain between two stones.