Nestled among rolling hills and grazing cows, Elmore Mountain Bread in central Vermont is quintessentially pastoral. The setting is apropos, given the owners' recent decision to start grinding their own flour by stone — a veritable step back in time.
Blair Marvin, who co-owns the bakery and mill with her husband, Andrew Heyn, says the motivation to build the mill came from a fellow baker in North Carolina, who sent them a surprise shipment of his own freshly milled flour about four years ago. Typically, flour has an almost dusty odor, but this flour smelled earthy, Marvin recalls. "We were like, 'whoa, whoa, whoa!'"
The couple had been thinking a lot about what they were putting into their bread. They'd recently had a baby — Phineas — whose foray into solids involved a diet heavy in baguettes. The flour they were using was organic but industrially produced. That shipment made them realize, says Marvin, "that we could control every step of the process" and create a loaf that tasted as good as the flour they were smelling.
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