Wheat is a seed. A seed contains oils. Oils go rancid. This is the fundamental reason freshly milled flour tastes different from flour that has been sitting in a bag for four months — and why the difference is not subtle. It is the difference between bread that tastes alive and bread that tastes like nothing in particular.
When a wheat berry is milled, the germ and bran are exposed to oxygen. The germ contains polyunsaturated oils that oxidize quickly — within days at room temperature, within weeks even in cool storage. Commercial flour producers handle this two ways: either they remove most of the germ to extend shelf life, producing white flour that keeps well but has lost nutrition and flavor, or they add chemical oxidizers and conditioners to stabilize the flour. Neither produces flour that smells and tastes the way fresh-milled grain does.
We source heritage and modern wheat varieties from a family mill in the Mississippi Delta — hard red winter wheat for our baguettes and country sourdough, soft white wheat for our pastry doughs. Grain arrives weekly. We mill three times a week on a stone mill in the bakehouse in quantities sized for the week's production. The flour is used within five days. The smell of fresh-ground wheat is nutty, slightly sweet, and unmistakably alive — it is one of the first things you notice when you walk into our bakehouse at 5 AM.
Fresh flour absorbs water differently, ferments faster, and produces a more complex flavor. The crumb of our sourdough has more color — the natural carotenoids in the wheat have not yet oxidized away — and a deeper, more varied taste: wheat-forward, slightly sweet, with a nuttiness that plain white bread does not have. We adjust our formulas seasonally as the grain changes. No two batches of our pain de campagne are identical, and that is as it should be.
Open daily from 7 AM · 2214 Frenchmen Street, New Orleans. Visit us →