World Grain - April 2019 - 50

FEATURE: SEEKING A NEW NICHE IN U.S. MILLING

Skagit Valley
baguettes made
from organic flour
are growing in
popularity.

Morse declined to name) to develop a roller mill/ stone
mill hybrid. Cainspring Mills currently has a capacity of 5
million to million pounds of flour per year, focusing on
serving smaller bakeries that use between 500 pounds and
,
pounds of flour per week. San rancisco s acclaimed
Tartine akery is their largest customer, Morse said.
"We choose a combination of roller and stone milling because of the way the stone incorporates the wheat
germ into the flow and incorporates those flavors into the
finished product, Morse said. y using a roller mill,
it essentially doubles our capacity to ,
kilograms
per hour.
Their milling process involves multiple steps: tempering the wheat, a roller break, then to the stone mill, and
finally a sift at the end prior to the finished flour.
Hunton of Camas Country Mill has been using stone
mills for more than six years. Much of what is milled and
packaged at Camas Country Mill comes direct from owner Tom Hunton s third generation family farm, located
southwest of unction City, regon, U.S. Hunton s arm
was started in
at the current farm headquarters by
Everett and Ellen Hunt.
His primary product is whole grain flour, said Morse,
who refers to Hunton as "my sensei when it comes to
grains. We focus on uropean style flour.

Cairnspring Mills works with nearly a dozen wheat
farmers in Washington and regon, where they often produce extremely high yields (100 to 150 bushels per acre)
of winter wheat, he said.
Reflecting on his previous career, Morse said, I got to
see what happens when local producers leave an area. We
lost a lot of farmers.
ow, their goal is to help rebuild the local
farm community.
We pay growers . to a bushel more than commodity wheat, he said. The bar is definitely higher, and
they have to earn it. We have no false notion that our flour
will replace commodity flour, but we are certainly going
to offer a choice and a whole new variety of flours that
you can t find elsewhere. Consumers today are willing to
pay for certain attributes. That s what makes it work.
Cairnspring Mills is banking on a higher customer demand for specialty flours that are
traceable made
from premium, identity preserved wheats.
e asquale said his wholesale bakery uses xpresso
variety wheat in a new single-origin bread line that includes three products a miche, baguette and pan bread.
ou can identify the flavors, e asquale said. It s a
good wheat. I ve been playing around with different flavors, wherever I can find heritage wheats. We needed to
make this work commercially. We re a mid si e bakery,
so a certain amount of bread has to be pretty consistent.
We can t say to the customer that this will be available
when it s available.
ooking ahead, Morse said the partners in the business
have aspirations for building more mills once they work
through the inevitable cycles of building a profitable business model.
ur idea of getting bigger is making bigger mills, he
said. We want to find new places with local communities
where there is a need. There s a market demand for traceability, and we are
traceable. We know all of our
farmers personally.
SPEARHEADING CHANGE
ueled by work from The read ab and others, innovators in the West coast and acific orthwest are helping lead the way for how specialty wheats are grown and
freshly milled into flour at local or regional mills.
icky iusto of Central Milling, a leading miller of
organic and specialty flours based in ogan, Utah, U.S.,
explained that milling in-house can create two very difficult horses to tame flour consistency and grain quality.
Many bakers that he sees milling in-house tend to blend
flour from a mill with their local product to make their in
house milling system work - "not ideal for the baker that
has all their chips on the local table, iusto said, but a
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World Grain - April 2019

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