The year was 2005 when the world understood how dignified the American baking industry had emerged. For the second time in three occasions, the US team had triumphed in the world’s most prestigious event for craft bakers, winning the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris. Today, the three US team members – William Leaman in artistic design, Jeffrey Yankellow in baguette & specialty breads, and Jory Downer in viennoiserie – are among the most prominent bakery experts in the country.

At the 2019 International Baking Industry Exposition (IBIE), Downer shared pleasant memories when he demonstrated an award-winning pastry that he and The Bread Bakers Guild of America Team USA produced. “We did a dulce de leche crémeux that we cast in a Flexipan and popped out and put in the center of the pastry. We added slices of fresh mango, papaya, and red currents for color.”

Viennoiserie now ranks among the most recognized categories of French pastry, thanks to its flagship baked good, the croissant, according to the Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. The word “viennoiserie” – French for “things from Vienna” – describes a whole category of pastry that includes croissants, pain au raisins and brioche.

Bennison’s Bakery has been a Chicago North Shore institution since 1938, earning a reputation as a popular full-line bakery that specializes in European-style pastries, cookies and custom-decorated cakes. In 1975, Jory Downer followed in his father’s footsteps to join the bakery after learning the craft from his father, Guy, and attending culinary school and classes to improve his skill, eventually achieving the position of Certified Master Baker.

Like many retail bakeries, Bennison’s evolved with changing times. Similarly, Randy George started Red Hen Baking Company in September 1999 on Route 100 in Duxbury, Vermont. George had been baking bread for several years, both in his home state of Maine as well as in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. When Randy and his (future) wife Eliza Cain decided to move back to Liza’s home turf in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, they did so with the intention of opening a bakery.

“We don’t really gain a clear picture of the times we are living in until we have the perspective of distance,” George says today. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot ever since we crossed the two-decade mark in our business a couple of years ago. In many ways, it seems like just yesterday that we hung out our shingle in September of ‘99. But when I think about other periods in history, I’m reminded that a lot happens in 20 years. Take 1945 to 1965, for instance. We can all think of huge changes that happened in those two decades. When you think about it, we probably have seen similarly world-altering changes in the last 20 years.”

Consider these factual nuggets, the baker recalls about the year they first opened:

• Bill Clinton was President.
• No one knew who Osama Bin Laden was.
• Cronuts were not even a twinkle in Dominique Ansel’s eye.
• The Bread Baker’s Guild of America was six years old.
• There was one option available to the bakery for flour milled from local wheat.
• It was whole wheat flour milled by the farmer who grew it and there was no available data on it.
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“If I was to guess, I’d say that the protein percentage was 9 at most,” George recalls. “My guess is that most years, this flour had a falling number of 200 or perhaps, less. In other words, as many bakers these days know, it wasn’t much use if it made up more than about 20% of a bread formula.

“Today, we all know what has transpired in the first four areas I listed,” he continues. “Many of us have also witnessed the transformation that has taken place across the country when it comes to bakers connecting with the source of our main ingredient. Twenty years ago, most bakers gave very little thought to where their flour came from. They would buy the type that worked for what they were making. Enthusiastic bakers might know the protein percentages of the flour they worked with, but many didn’t even think about that… and almost no one thought about things like ash content, wheat types and varieties, or where the wheat was grown.”

Today, from field to hearth and everywhere in between, people have thrown themselves into the work of educating themselves about grain growing, harvesting, and milling. It’s not entirely unusual these days to find bakers discussing such esoteric topics as the differences between Red Fife and Benatka wheat or how they dressed their millstones and adjusted the screens on their bolter to get a really silky high extraction flour, George points out.

“In the early 2000s, I recall being so excited when we bought flour from a large organic mill that listed the name and location of the farmer (usually in Nebraska or Kansas) on each load of flour. We supplemented that flour by buying a small amount of that aforementioned whole wheat flour. That was about as good as it got back then. Today, we buy all but a tiny fraction of our grain and flour from three farmers. All of that grain is grown within 150 miles of the bakery. We stone mill several hundred pounds of whole wheat, rye and corn every week on our locally made mill.”

If you told George in 2001 that this would be the bakery’s reality in 2021, he never would have believed it. And the story of Red Hen is not entirely unusual. The list of university-based researchers doing groundbreaking work on growing, processing and baking with local grain is long and covers all regions of the country.

 
“We have Steve Jones’ Bread Lab in Washington State,” George says. “In Vermont, it’s Heather Darby and the Northern Grain Growers Association, but that’s only the beginning. These days, it seems that every corner of the U.S. has a team of agronomists and bakers working to advance the production of top-quality grain that is well-suited to that particular area. In each of these areas, there is a list of bakeries putting this new knowledge to use by creating great bread that is an expression of the new agricultural economy that continues to develop in response to the enthusiasm for local grain.”