“It’s summer camp for grain nerds.” ~Annie Moss, Seastar Bakery   Exactly! I’ve been gathering in the fields and classrooms of WSU Bread Lab for four years now and I’ve struggled to find the one-liner that describes what this annual pilgrimage is all about.   Thoughts/Lessons/Notes from the Grain Gathering 2017   ~Always, always, always discuss any lecture you hear with at least three other women and at least one person of color. You need perspective in this wide world and you can only get it from talking about ideas, but especially—and I mean ESPECIALLY—from listening to other perspectives … Read more

~Originally published in Bake From Scratch Magazine, Fall 2016 I first met Nan Kohler at a grain conference. In a room packed with wheat breeders, grass seed farmers, and bakers, Nan introduced herself as a miller. Not a baker who occasionally tried making flour, or a grass seed farmer who needed to figure out how to get their product to market, but a miller, plain and simple. She told me about Grist & Toll, a small milling operation that she’d opened in 2012 in Los Angeles. I’d never thought about how flour is made or the technicalities of turning … Read more

The first time I met Brant, he was deep in conversation with a mutual friend, regaling her about discovering kaymak in Turkey. A small crowd was gathering. Many of us had never heard of this Turkish fresh cheese, but Brant’s love of food and culture and the discovery of where they cross was totally infectious. I reached out the next day and we made lunch plans. I showed up with a loaf of bread and he showed up with homemade mozzarella. We were instant friends. It turned out that he’d been traveling the world taking lessons near and far … Read more

This is a guest post by Lola Milholland, co-founder of Umi Organics *Originally published on Communal Table   In my early twenties, I was riding my bike across the Broadway Bridge over Portland’s Willamette River on a warm summer night when a dust of wheat bran and dirt covered my legs. My eyes followed the dust cloud down to the riverbank to a barge attached to a mammoth structure of cement cylinders by a claptrap of metal ramps. I had biked past this scene thousands of times in my life. At home, I looked the place up. The Cargill … Read more