Gluten-free bakers, low carb cooks, and fitness bloggers are all atwitter about peanut flour. What's the deal? Peanut flour is made by taking roasted peanuts, grinding them into a paste (like peanut butter but without the added salt, sugar, or any added oils) and then pressing out the oil. The process is quite similar to extracting juice from grapes to make wine.
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The Flour Art Museum in Ahrensburg, Germany, has a collection of over 1,900 flour sacks from around the world.
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"You could give me dog-shit wheat, and I could still make it taste great." —Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] Just as tomatoes have spent the last few hundred years getting the flavor slowly sucked out of them, in favor of more convenient attributes like uniformity in size and color and resistance to the rigors of transcontinental shipping, wheat has undergone a similar process. Unlike tomatoes, which, discounting any Native American influence, have been bred for a mere few hundred years, wheat, a staple grain since the earliest civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, has had a 10,000-year breeding program. Modern wheat is designed for high yields, and to produce flours with consistently high protein contents. In the meantime,...
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The news hit me like a ton of grits. Smuckers, the company that bought the White Lily flour company, is closing the White Lily plant in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the end of the month. After that, White Lily will only be made at two plants in the midwest. According to the company, the While Lily flour produced at the two new plants is indistinguishable from the old. A.) I'm sure that's not true. B.) The product itself is not what's at stake here. To every Southern baker I know, White Lily is synonymous with the South. It represents the soul of Southern baking tradition. Move White Lily out of the South? That's insane. That would be like moving Kossar's Bialys...
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