The New Flour Power

THE FRUIT Scone you crave at your favorite bakery, the restaurant bread you can't resist, the farmers market tortillas that sell out before you get there: If you wonder why they're better than anything else around, it's probably the flour.

Specifically, we're talking about small-batch wholegrain flours from a growing network of farmers and millers around the country. More than a blank canvas for fruit and chocolate and cream and spices, these flours are as nimble as all-purpose but contribute to taste and texture in a way it can't.

"I don't like the term 'allpurpose," said Kelly Whitaker, co-founder with his wife, Erika Whitaker, of Id -Est hospitality group and its Dry Storage grain mill, both in Boulder, Colo. "Every flour has a purpose." He views all-purpose flour as a supporting player that provides stability for more idiosyncratic grains.

Erika Chan, pastry chef at the Catbird Seat in Nashville, has started to subtract other ingredients from recipes to let the flour-from Janie's Mill, 80 miles south of Chicago-shine. "I have a cruller on the menu right re now, and I'm OK for it to have no spices," she said.

"Because it's made with really great flour." t d Play With It Like any interesting new acquaintance, specialty flours require extra initial effort: Pay attention to how they behave and be willing to tinker with a recipe to make them happy.

Cairnspring Mills, a Washington state mill that's supplied restaurants and bakeries for a decade, offers customers a short online tutorial to diminish the risk of failure. Other retail sites are full of information and tips.

And fleeting imperfection is a small price to pay for getting the equation right the next time.

So I learned when I bought a bag of Sonora, a soft wheat flour, from Sherry Mandell of Tehachapi Grain Project, a collective of Southern California small farms growing drought-tolerant heritage varieties. Mandell sells smallbatch flours milled from those grains at the Wednesday farmers market in Santa Monica, Calif., with such messianic zeal that I couldn't wait to get mine home and start baking.

I measured out a full cupfor-cup substitution Sonora for all-purpose-and I watched through the oven window as the pretty pleats that rimmed my plum galette dissolved into something more akin to a sandy beach.

Sonora, I learned, absorbs more moisture than supermarket flour. But that was hardly a deal breaker. The flour's flavor-described by bakers and millers as buttery, rich, nutty or all three-more than compensated for that first crust's messy look.

The first commandment, then: Start slow. Substitute whole-grain flour for 20% of the all-purpose in a recipe, and increase from there. The next time I made the crust I used one-quarter Sonora and three-quarters all-purpose, reduced the amount of liquid, and ended up with a crust that looked like the hundreds I'd made before and tasted much better. Since then I've successfully inched up to a fifty-fifty all-purpose-Sonora split.

Vive la Différence Whole-wheat flours derive their fuller flavor from what white allpurpose flour lacks: the layer of bran that coats each grain and the germ at its core.

Those go rancid more quickly than the pale, starchy endosperm will.

Stripped down to only the latter, white flour has a longer shelf-life that enables it to sit longer in a warehouse or a supermarket aisle.

Smaller-batch bakers can trade some of that durability for flavor.

Jyan Isaac, whose eponymous bread and pastry business in Santa Monica, Calif., currently includes a thriving retail outlet and a production facility, buys much of his flour from Cairnspring Mills.

"The flavor of the bread's crust, how it caramelizes, that's because of the nutrients in the flour," he said.

As demand for diverse flours has grown among professionals and home bakers, so has production-relatively speaking. Kevin Morse, who founded Cairnspring Mills eight years ago, got stopped by TSA inspectors early on "because I was carrying little Ziploc bags of flour samples." Last year the mill processed 6 million pounds of flour that shipped to Los Angeles and New York City. (For context,

From top: Sasha Piligian's pastries at Canyon Coffee in Echo Park, Los Angeles; Tehachapi Grain Project's red fife wheat a big commercial mill produces that much in a day.) A decade ago, the Tehachapi Grain Project started out with 10 acres; this year, it planted about 250, with an eye toward adding an online retail outlet. Dry Storage's Kelly Whitaker says orders from home bakers comprise only a sliver of his business, but he plans to get his flour into more restaurants and bakeries where home bakers can experience the difference.

"It's like black-and-white television versus color," said Sasha Piligian, a Los Angeles baker who supplies pastries to Canyon Coffee and cafes in the city. "It's hard to go back to all-purpose. You feel you've missed something."