Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains

Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains

Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains

Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains

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Overview

The most accessible and authoritative guide to making delicious homemade bread using flour milled from whole grains—with dozens of recipes! 

“Bread lovers of all skill levels are sure to find themselves returning to this one time and again.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A pioneer of the at-home milling movement, Adam Leonti has written the definitive guide that modernizes this old-world tradition for home cooks and amateur breadheads. With step-by-step photographs and comprehensive instructions to guide you through each technique, plus guidance on all aspects of home milling, including sourcing wheat or flour and choosing the right equipment for your kitchen, Flour Lab is a master class at making better-tasting and more nutritious food.

Thirty-five recipes for bread, pasta, pizza, cake, and pastry serve as a practical base, and Leonti provides dozens of delicious recipes to tailor them to your taste, including:

• Bread: Potato Rolls with Honey Butter; Bagels; Yeasted Ciabatta
• Pasta: Canderli (bread dumplings); Ricotta and Lemon Zest Ravioli; Chicken Liver and Saffron Ragù
• Pizza: Butter, Honey, and Lavender Bianco-style Pizza; Robia, Mortadella, and Arugula Pizza al Taglio; Tomato and Stracciatella Pizza Napoletana
• Pastry, Cookies, and Cakes: Biscotti with almond and grapefruit; Whole Wheat Croissants; Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Embracing freshly milled flour in these recipes—and all the ones you already love to make—will ensure that you never have a stale meal again.

Praise for Flour Lab

“Do you want to make pasta from freshly milled our? Pizza and focaccia? Pastry and bread? The genius of this book is that it expands the possibilities of using freshly milled grains—think flavor, texture, nutrition, uniqueness—across a broad, delicious spectrum. Adam Leonti’s Flour Lab is clearly composed, enthusiastic, and inspiring.”—Ken Forkish, author of Flour Water Salt Yeast

Flour Lab is not only a beautiful and inspiring book, but it also vividly portrays, through its excellently written narrative and amazing recipes, the personal—yet universal—journey of the artisan soul. Adam Leonti’s own discovery process of the joys of milling and baking with fresh flour is now a lasting and enriching gift to us all.”—Peter Reinhart, author of The Bread Baker’s ApprenticeBread Revolution, and Perfect Pan Pizza

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781524760960
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date: 09/10/2019
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 8.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Adam Leonti is a Brooklyn-born, Maine-bred chef and baker. He began cooking as a child, preparing meals alongside his Sicilian grandfather and Neapolitan grandmother, and took his first kitchen job at age fourteen. In 2008 he became the chef de cuisine at Vetri, a critically acclaimed Philadelphia institution that won accolades including Philadelphia magazine’s “Best Italian Restaurant,” was a James Beard Foundation Award finalist for “Outstanding Restaurant,” and was included in Travel + Leisure magazine’s “Best Italian Restaurants in the U.S.” In 2012, Adam was named one of Forbes magazine’s prestigious “30 Under 30” professionals in the food and wine industry, as well as an Eater “Young Gun.” In 2015, Adam founded the Brooklyn Bread Lab, a mill and bakery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Outside of the kitchen, Adam finds inspiration studying his voluminous cookbook collection, which comprises more than 1,000 volumes including a favorite, Giuliano Bugialli’s The Fine Art of Italian Cooking. He is a graduate of the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia. His eponymous restaurant, Leonti, opened in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2018.
 
Katie Parla, a New Jersey native, is a Rome-based food and beverage journalist, culinary guide, and educator. She is the author of Food of the Italian South and a Saveur award–winning personal website covering food and travelKatie has written or contributed to more than twenty-five books about Italy and Turkey. Her travel writing, recipes, and food criticism appear in the New York Times, Food & Wine, Saveur, Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Guardian, Afar, Condé Nast Traveler, Punch, and Eater, and she is the coauthor of the IACP Award–winning cookbook Tasting Rome.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Before I say anything else, I should probably reveal my sole reason for writing this book: Food made with freshly milled flour is better for your health, the environment, and flavor. I want everyone to start using it.

Cooking and baking with freshly milled flour is a real passion and has become a significant part of what fuels me as a chef. One of the greatest aspects of working with food is that if you listen to the ingredients, they will tell you how to use them. I don’t mean this in some wacky, whimsical way, but in the most practical sense. If you pick up an apple and it’s underripe, use its texture to your advantage: slice it thinly and toss it in a salad. Give an overripe apple over to its natural evolution and mash it into jam or bake it into a pie. And if it’s perfectly ripe, just take a bite. I’m a firm believer that ingredients should dictate the menu, not the cook preparing it. I apply the same reasoning to wheat. Red Fife and other hard wheat varieties are adapted for making big, airy loaves of bread, while soft wheats like Sonora, which was historically and famously used to make super large tortillas in the Mexican state of Sonora, are best for pastries and cakes. Some wheat varieties are all-around performers and can do almost anything, but it’s up to the baker or cook to coax and tame their versatile characteristics.

It is so personally rewarding for me to introduce people to how good freshly milled flour is and how it can be harnessed. Seeing someone’s face light up when they try a slice of my fresh-milled durum sourdough bread, or hearing that they feel nourished from eating a whole wheat croissant I have baked—that’s what drives me.

If you’re skeptical, remember that it wasn’t so long ago that buying organic food was considered highbrow and unnecessary. I remember early in my career seeing a celebrated chef yell at his sous-chef for buying organic vegetables because they were considerably more expensive. At the time, his frustration seemed rational. But before long, opinions changed, and a greater knowledge and understanding led us to accept that buying chemical-free produce was responsible food sourcing and the right thing to do for our bodies. 

I’m a chef. I feed people. The word “restaurant” derives from the French “to restore to a former state,” and I feel strongly that if people trust me with their time, money, and calories, I have a duty to nourish them to the best of my abilities. I am also an enthusiastic teacher and I love to share recipes and techniques with home cooks and professionals alike, so I am excited to share my approach to using flour with you. Throughout this book, we will explore the wonderful world of milling, how to source grains for milling at home, and how to approach purchasing fresh flour directly from a mill. We’ll get into the intricacies of working with fresh flour, and discuss how the characteristics of different grains work alone or in unison to create flavor and structure for bread, pasta, pizza, and pastry. With its collection of simple and adaptable recipes that highlight just how good true whole-grain cooking and baking can be, I hope this book changes the way you think about cooking and ingredients for good.

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