Pizza

This weekends pizza made from local flour, mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, and herbs.

Foray to find local flour

I put up a Craigslist ad yesterday looking for locally produced flour, thinking it would be kinda hard to find. Boy was I wrong. When I woke up this morning I had half a dozen emails from people that had local flour, organic local flour, conventional local flour, heirloom local flour, and so on and so forth.

So, after talking to a few people, I settled on buying a 50lbs bag of whole wheat flour from Hunton Farms. After a phone call and a few emails, I learned that this particular farm has been producing flour for quite a while using another company to do the milling. This mill has been in operation for over a hundred years, is water powered, and sound awesome. However, it turns out the cost of transporting tons of wheat a hundred or so miles, paying for the crush and separation just wasn't economically good--so they are building the first flour mill I'm aware of in Eugene Oregon.

This mill is a 25 horse power, stone ground mill. The grain goes in the top, and the top rotating stone crushes the grain. The crush then goes out the chutes to rotating screens, separating the flour from the bran depending on the type of flour.

It was really fascinating to see an actual flour mill. I was expecting it to be much, much bigger (and in fact the guy there agreed with me on that), but it was compact and efficient looking.

So, the bag of flour I picked up wasn't ground with this machine, but it certainly it cool looking. The whole wheat flour is made from hard red spring wheat, with a protein content of 14.3%. So I still want to find some local pastry flour (which these guys may make at some point I hope).

Lastly, after picking up the flour I went down to one of our farms, Detering Orchards and picked up some cucumbers, beets, and carrots for pickling. The vingar, sugar, and salt I used were conventional, but the vegetables and dill were grown right around here. Even after one day, the dill pickles taste so much better than store bought.

Dill Pickles

• 8 lbs small pickling cucumbers
• 20 black peppercorns
• 4 red dried chile peppers
• 14 dill heads
• 5 1/2 cups vinegar
• 6 cups water
• 1/2 cup pickling salt
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 6 grape leaves

1. Combine all the ingredients except the dill, cucumbers, and grape leaves, and bring to a boil.
2. Gently scrub the cucumbers, remove any blossoms and stems, and stuff them along with the dill and grape leaves in two gallon jars.
3. When the brine begins to boil, cut the heat and pour equally over the two jars. Top off with 50/50 water and vinegar if there is too little.
4. Let cool, and store in a cold, dark place (i.e. your fridge).
5. Make sure to immediately start eating them, because they are irresistible.