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STONE MILLS

The best millstones are at once hard and porous, so that they wear slowly and do not become smooth even with long use. The last known quarry that produced such stones was in France, and it has been exhausted; the best natural stones now are cut from hard pink granite, and these are the only natural stones available today, that we know of. Many of the big natural foods firms that sell stone-ground flour use mills with such stones, 30 inches across. Our own 8-inch version—scarcely home-size—is the smallest the Meadows Mill company sells: with it we grind wheat, corn, rice and rye for a dozen families.

Like the larger stones, ours has to be sharpened after about 100 hours of milling. It definitely requires the kind of care that you expect to give a fine tool: we have learned how to face (sharpen) the stones, adjust them, and grease the running parts. When the stone is sharp and properly adjusted it grinds very cool and as fine as needed for our purposes. The mill is not terrifically easy to clean or pretty to look at, unless you really appreciate the no-frills approach—but after more than three years of regular use, we like it very much indeed.

We do not know of any small home-sized stone mill that has nautral stones. Most have composite stones made of hard bits of abrasive, bonded together, and we feel there is some question about whether this is safe. No matter what the mill is that grinds your grain, you can count on traces of the grinding surface finding their way into the flour.

One home mill, the Samap, uses hard natural Greek Naxos stones instead of Carborundum. These mills are not inexpensive, but they do adjust to grind flour very fine and will grind coarsely enough for cereal grain, too, though like other stone mills, they can’t handle seeds or wet grains (sprouts), beans or such.

About the Ingredients:

Yeast

There are millions of species of yeast, but our familiar baking yeasts (and brewer’s yeasts too) are all from the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a highly refined sort. Before the turn of the century and the advent of dependable commercial baking yeast, breadmaking was an art surrounded by many mysteries. Getting bread to rise wasn’t easy, and getting it to rise and taste good was even more challenging. Brewer’s yeast, barms, homemade “potato yeast”—there were many methods, and some of them involved days or weeks of fussing. A good starter was a great treasure, and secrets were not easily shared. Our friend Sultana, who grew up in a tiny village in northern Greece, recently asked her mother where you would get a starter like the one they used to make the family’s bread. Her mother was incredulous: Why, you would get it from your mother, of course. What if you didn’t have a mother? Well, maybe your aunt would give it to you. What if you had no family? Then you wouldn’t make bread!

The yeast we take so much for granted is produced commercially by a rather simple but highly controlled process. Different yeast strains are used for active dry yeast and compressed yeast, each one developed to withstand the storage conditions it will have to face while still maintaining its leavening power and other baking characteristics. Huge vats of a diluted solution of molasses, mineral salts, and ammonia are seeded with carefully selected strains of yeast. Sterile air bubbles through and the seed yeast grows until literally tons of it are ready for harvest. The yeast is separated from the solution, washed, then mixed with water and emulsifiers for compressed yeast or dried over a period of hours for active dry yeast. Sometimes preservatives are mixed in; if so, they have to be listed on the ingredient label.

Yeast is a simple one-celled plant, and like all living things it grows best in a certain climate, with adequate food and water. Dough meets all its requirements: calories, minerals, vitamins, and simple nitrogen for making protein. Yeast likes a neutral to slightly acid pH, and some oxygen too, though it can get