ROCHESTER, NY – The Genesee River and the Erie Canal – two waterways that cut through Rochester NY and once powered mills that ground grains into flour – made 19th-century Rochester a boom-town and the largest flour-producing city in the United States in 1838. Those mills also earned Rochester the nickname of “Flour City.”
Today, as Wegmans begins its 100th anniversary year, its Pittsford store will bring back the best of traditional bread baking, with simple, pure organic ingredients grown near Wegmans stores.
Wegmans Pittsford, which sits little more than a stone’s throw away from the Erie Canal, revives this link to history with the installation of a beautiful, handcrafted mill near the bakery. It is likely the first mill inside a supermarket in the nation.
When it comes to bread, the Osttiroler Getreidemühlen (Tyrolean combination mill) will take freshness to a whole new level. Under the care of Nick Greco, Wegmans’ bread artisan, only organic grains will be used in the mill. The flour will be mixed into dough right away and baked when ready in ovens.
The first kind of bread to be made is Einkorn Rye, a deliciously moist, dense, chocolate-colored loaf in the shape of a brick. It has a gentle tang with just a hint of sweetness, provided by local honey and molasses. The organic Einkorn and rye used for this bread are grown on farms in Penn Yan, about an hour’s drive from Pittsford. A loaf of Einkorn Rye will sell for $5.50.
Einkorn wheat is an ancient grain first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. It has lower yields than modern wheat varieties, but it can survive droughts and marginal soil conditions better than modern varieties.
“Baking with flour made from locally-sourced grains, right out of the mill, is a very special experience,” Greco says. “There are flavor notes, and a subtle sweetness you can taste in a really fresh loaf that aren’t there if a few weeks have passed since the flour was milled. I compare it to the difference between tasting an apple that’s been in cold storage to a ripe apple you pick from the tree.”
For Greco, bread truly is the staff of his life. Since the 1980s, his work has focused on learning how to make outstanding European-style breads, from baguettes to country-style loaves with hard crusts and dense, chewy centers, and teaching others what he has learned. He is part of the bread revolution and local grain movement in the United States that celebrates the goodness of traditional methods of making simple, hearty breads from grains grown on nearby farms. He discovered early on that the best-tasting loaves he could make used freshly milled flour, so he kept a small electric mill in his work area, to use as he was developing new kinds of breads for Wegmans.
How the mill came to Pittsford
One day, Wegmans CEO Danny Wegman came by and Greco offered him a taste test to show the difference that freshly milled flour could make. Tasting was believing, and a couple of weeks later, Greco was on a plane to Austria to visit a manufacturer of award-winning mills that Wegman had met some 30 years earlier. The mission: To see if the Green family’s plant could build a mill with the versatility Greco wanted, yet also function in a supermarket setting.
The family-owned company, based in the Lienz area of Austria at the foot of the Alps, built a mill for the Pittsford store made of beautiful, durable Alpine pine with a stone grinder inside, which can produce a wide range of different flours. The mill is 10 by 4 by 7 feet. It will be visible in the store, but not noisy – you can comfortably have a conversation nearby while the mill is operating.
For now, the mill will be used to make flour only for Einkorn Rye bread, and after Wegmans bakers grow familiar with producing that loaf, the mill will be used to make other stone-ground, local, organic flours for other varieties of breads.
Among life’s simple pleasures, biting into a dense, chewy slice of handcrafted bread so fresh that it’s still warm from the oven must be among the greatest!
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Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. is an 88-store supermarket chain with stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts. The family-owned company, recognized as an industry leader and innovator, is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2016. Wegmans has been named one of the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ by FORTUNE magazine for 18 consecutive years, ranking #7 in 2015. The company also ranked #1 for Corporate Reputation, among the 100 ‘most-visible companies’ nationwide in the 2015 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient ® study.
Source: Wegmans Food Markets, Inc.