MADISON, Wis. (AP) - At Madison Sourdough, Andrew Hutchison is playing the long game.
Hutchison, head baker and co-owner of Sourdough at 916 Williamson St. since 2009, has been slowly incorporating local grains into the bakery’s breads and pastries over the past few years.
That’s a goal farmers and eaters alike applaud, but it’s more complicated than it sounds. Last year, hoping to get more consistent results from fickle Wisconsin grains, Madison Sourdough purchased a German mill that uses volcanic stones to grind flour fresh every Tuesday and Thursday.
“I wanted to take more control over our basic raw ingredients,” Hutchison said. “I’m a little bit of a control freak. If I’m milling it here … we can make adjustments really quickly. My reaction time is two, three days.”
Now, each week, 30 to 40 percent of the flour in the bakery’s breads and pastries comes from its own mill, a tall, blonde wood grinder that lives in a room behind the MSCo Patisserie.
Antique grains - Hutchison prefers “antique” or “heritage” over “ancient” - like Turkey Red and kamut can be more challenging to work with than the blends Madison Sourdough has been buying for years. Most of the time, though, they’re worth it, yielding breads with slightly sweet graham-like flavors, earthiness, nuttiness and toast.
“We get away from these heritage or ancient grains because other grains are easier to grow, have better yields, are disease resistant,” Hutchison said. They “yield a better product for making bread or pastry.”
Turkey Red, for example, “tastes really great if it’s treated correctly, it has fantastic flavor,” he said. “But it’s very difficult to work with.”
From a baking perspective, Turkey Red doesn’t have good tolerance for fermentation, what the yeast does during the proofing of bread that gives it aroma and flavor. It doesn’t have much “mixing tolerance” either, so in a production setting a Turkey Red dough is “very needy,” Hutchison said.
The Capital Times (https://bit.ly/29gAMLX ) reports that Hutchison isn’t sure yet if that grain in particular is worth working with long-term.
“It’s interesting, it tastes really good and it gets people thinking about the grain they’re eating,” he said. “That’s what I’m after. With the mill and being able to select different types of grains and varieties of wheat, it gets people thinking a lot more about a really basic food source.”
Milling in-house allows Hutchison to control for issues in the grain and respond very quickly to problems. The flour is also fresher.
“The freshness - I noticed it right away,” Hutchison said. “It’s like a really good tomato next to a just-okay one.”
When a grain of wheat cracks, it begins to oxidize right away. Fresh flour is considered “unstable,” Hutchison explained, and oxidation equalizes it and makes it more stable and consistent.
That comes at the expense of flavor, compounds in the wheat that contribute to the aroma of the bread. The fresher the flour, the tastier the bread.
“I want flours that taste really good,” Hutchison said. “Kamut, to me, has a natural sweetness to it, really mild, kind of creamy. It has warm spice notes, so I pick up cinnamon, maybe a little fennel, orange zest.
“When it’s deeply caramelized, it has a nice graham-y flavor to it. We use it in our scones now. When you add sugar or a little honey to it, it has a graham cracker flavor to it.”
Madison Sourdough mills about 1,500 pounds a week. That’s not huge, Hutchison said, at most 40 percent of what he uses in the bakery. The rest is mostly King Arthur Flour from Vermont.
By contrast, Lonesome Stone Milling mills between 4,000 and 5,000 pounds of grain per week, from farmers in Dodgeville, outside Lone Rock and near Blue River.
Most of what Sourdough mills is a winter wheat called Jerry, which makes up most of the bakery’s sourdough starter. They also mill whole wheat, rye and specialty grains, including 50 pounds a week of Turkey Red and kamut.
Hutchison said he’d like to mill more, but the flour needs to be consistent. He’s also starting to dictate what grains farmers grow, like how a chef might ask a farmer to plant certain kinds of peppers.
“I’d like to get the number up, but the quality of the grains has to get better,” he said. “Some breads we can manipulate and use exclusively the grains we’re milling. But to have something that’s consistent, meets customer expectations as far as the texture of the loaf … I’m cutting it with high quality commercial flour.”
Adding the mill did cut costs from buying flour from Lonesome Stone, but not dramatically. It’s more about the principal of the thing - the long term effects.
“Controlling raw ingredients, that’s great,” Hutchison said. But “we’re not a huge bakery by any means. I wanted to help build a market for farmers who want to grow grains, especially organically, in Wisconsin.
“It’s good crop rotation, it creates healthy soil. It’s works in a system where you have livestock and vegetables really well. Those are positive things for sustainability, but they also need a place to sell it.”
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Information from: The Capital Times, https://www.madison.com/tct
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