How We Ended Up Building a Stone Flour Mill
I never set out to become a miller.
It started much more simply than that. I wanted better flour for our family.
The more I learned about conventional flour, the more questions I had about what we were eating every day. I wanted flour that wasn't heavily processed or enriched with vitamins and minerals after milling. I wanted to know how the grain had been grown, where it came from, and whether pesticides had been used.
Mostly, I wanted something simple: grain grown well, milled well, and left as close to the way nature made it as possible.
That curiosity eventually took us much further than I ever expected.
From a bag of grain to a flour mill
What began as an interest in cleaner flour slowly turned into learning everything I could about grain.
And then, in the way these things sometimes happen in our family, we decided that if we couldn't find exactly what we were looking for, perhaps we could make it ourselves.
My husband built our mills.
Not little countertop grain mills, either. We eventually had two 36-inch stone mills, and what started as a personal interest grew into a full commercial milling operation. Before long, we were milling enormous amounts of grain. Thousands of tons passed through those mills over the years, and with every batch I learned something.
I learned that wheat isn't simply wheat.
There are hard wheats and soft wheats, modern varieties and heritage varieties, grains with strong personalities and others that quietly disappear into an everyday loaf.
I learned which grains make beautiful bread and which are better suited to pastries, pancakes or muffins. I learned about Red Fife, hard red and hard white wheat, spelt, einkorn, emmer, khorasan and so many others.
Each had its own history, flavor, nutritional qualities and purpose in the kitchen.
Red Fife became one I returned to again and again. It had character—a rich, distinctly wheaty flavor—but could also be surprisingly versatile. With the right milling and sifting, the same grain could produce very different flour. That's something I still find fascinating today.
Flour taught me to pay attention
Milling commercially changed the way I looked at food. When you work with grain every day, you begin noticing things most of us never have a reason to think about.
How finely was it milled?
How much bran remained?
Was it sifted?
How did that change the flavor?
How did it change the way the flour absorbed water?
Why did one wheat make a beautiful loaf while another behaved completely differently?
I learned that two bags labeled stone-ground flour could be very different products.
Stone milling was only part of the story. What we did with the flour afterward mattered, too. Sifting a little of the coarse bran could change the texture and baking performance dramatically, while leaving the flour more whole created an entirely different result.
It became less about following rules and more about understanding the grain in front of me.
And I loved that.
Then there were the things nobody tells you about owning a flour mill
Like flour dust.
So. Much. Flour dust.
When you imagine a stone mill, you might picture beautiful wheat berries pouring between stones and bags of freshly milled flour coming out the other side. And yes, there was plenty of that. But there was also ventilation. A lot of ventilation. One of the things we quickly had to take very seriously was dust management. Fine flour dust doesn't just get absolutely everywhere—it can also be highly combustible when suspended in the air. Suddenly ventilation wasn't about keeping the mill comfortable or clean. It was part of operating safely.
There were machines to understand, systems to build, equipment to maintain, food-safety requirements to meet and countless practical problems we had to solve as we grew.
We eventually built out a commercial kitchen, developed our products and went through the process of having them organically certified. What had started with me wanting cleaner flour for our family had become a real food business.
But the grain was always my favorite part
The business taught me plenty, but the part that stayed with me most was learning about the grain itself.
Where did this variety originate?
Why had people grown it for generations?
What nutrients were naturally present?
Why did one wheat taste buttery while another tasted deeply earthy and wheaty?
Why was one wonderful for bread but frustrating for pastry?
And why had we become so accustomed to flour tasting like...almost nothing?
Once you've tasted freshly milled grain with real character, it's difficult not to become curious. Flour stopped being an anonymous white ingredient in the cupboard.
It became food. There was a plant behind it. A farmer. A variety. A place where it grew. A mill. A method. And depending on all of those things, a completely different result could end up on our table.
Life looks very different now
I don't own that mill anymore.
Our family eventually sold nearly everything we owned in Canada, including the milling business, and set off on an entirely different adventure. Right now we're traveling, looking for a simpler and more affordable place in the world to eventually make home. So there isn't a 36-inch stone mill humming away outside my kitchen anymore. But I still find myself thinking about grain. I still notice flour when I walk through a market. I want to know what people are growing locally. I want to know how they mill it and what they bake with it. And when someone tells me their fresh-milled bread is dense or their dough suddenly feels completely different, I immediately start thinking through all the reasons why.
Apparently you can sell the flour mill.
It's a little harder to stop being a miller.
And perhaps that's why I wanted to start sharing this part of our story again.
There is so much I learned during those years that I never really wrote down—the things that came from standing beside the mill, talking to farmers, handling different grains, baking with them and making plenty of mistakes along the way.
I'm slowly putting those lessons here now.
Not because everyone needs to build a flour mill in their backyard.
Although, knowing us, I suppose that's always an option.
But because I think there's something valuable about understanding our food a little better.
Knowing where it came from. Knowing how it was made.
And remembering that sometimes the simplest ingredients have much bigger stories than we realize.
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