Last year I learned about a website here in Turkey that puts small-scale food producers directly in touch with the consumers, Toprakana. As I started my pursuit for the perfect sourdough to serve at Babushka, I placed my first order for a few bags of flour from a small watermill where they grind a blend of local wheat varieties into the whole grain flour (they do rye and corn too, needless to say, all whole grain).

My order arrived the morning after I placed it; the flour in the cotton bags without a single label was milled that very week! A tremendous difference from the whole wheat flour milled half a year ago you can get at the local stores. The stone-ground flour looked different too. The commercial varieties felt almost starch-like silky and looked predominantly white with occasional grayish-brownish freckles of bran as if the flour was refined from the bran, milled and then some bran was integrated back. The stone-milled whole wheat flour felt coarse and had a pleasant a golden brown tint. Its bran was abundant and visible. I was jumping with joy thinking about the new highs my baking was going to climb.

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