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Hmm, I was hoping the link would work, did you try it?
No, the WSJ article focused on professional artisan bakers, not home bakers. It did note that some bakers, like Chad Robertson of Tartine, have started milling their own wheat or cutting deals with local millers. It'll be interesting to see if he writes another volume of the Tartine cookbook series that talks about it.
Those of us with home grain mills have long faced the difficulty of obtaining affordable whole grain for milling. I used to be able to get a 25 pound bag of Wheat Montana hard red wheat for about $14, but both local sources no longer carry it. Most recently I paid about $17 plus shipping to order a 26 pound bucket of it from walmart.com. (Walmart has just started offering free shipping on a lot of items, I guess they're trying to compete with Amazon Prime.)
You could look for a grocery store that has a Wheat Montana in-store grinding station, but a nearby store recently discontinued theirs. Not enough people buying it, I suspect.
The article does say that freshly milled flour should be used in 1-2 weeks, and I'm sure any flour you can buy in bags in a store will be a lot older than that. Peter Reinhart noted in one of his books that freshly milled flour should be used right away, within 24 hours, or allowed to age for 2 weeks.
The article touches on but doesn't really explain how sourdough has a lower glycemic index.
I can deal with the cost of veal, but it's so hard to find any! Our local grocery stores tend to carry at most ground veal. The one store that reliably had (frozen) veal cutlets burned down earlier this week--a fire that started in the compressor room.
I recommend Carol Fields' book, "The Italian Baker". Her method for making grissini (thin bread sticks) is both fast and fun to do, and they're every bit as good as the ones I had in Turin.
There's a vendor at the local farmers markets who has a Forno Bravo wood-burning oven that he hauls around to farmers markets and other functions. He says it takes several hours to get up to temp and 2-3 days to cool completely down.
Please keep us posted on your progress. The San Francisco Baking Institute has run a few short courses on baking breads and pizzas in a wood burning oven. I think King Arthur Flour has run similar courses in Vermont.
It’s probably a good thing we weren’t planning on doing a big tomato garden this year, we’ve had about 6 inches of rain in the last two weeks and more is forecast for this weekend, so the garden area is way too wet to plant in. We'll be lucky to have it dried out by Memorial Day.
Also, we had about 45 minutes of hail the other day, many of the plants my wife was getting ready to put in her flower beds look like they were run through a shredder, and any tomatoes in the garden would have suffered, too.
We consider mulberry little more than a noxious weed!
Here's the key section:
Meanwhile, restrictions on cane-sugar imports into the EU will remain. The combination could squeeze importers like Tate & Lyle Sugars, whose London refinery has been turning cane sugar into sweetener for 138 years.
“The clock’s ticking for us,” said Gerald Mason, a vice president of Tate & Lyle as he watched a crane unload a 35,000-ton shipment of sugar. “We are not going to be competitive after 2017 unless the regulation is changed.”
I wasn't sure if that link would work, good to know what works and what doesn't. I was half-way expecting that WSJ story to morph into the Brexit issue when they brought up Tate & Lyle.
Taxing to discourage consumption has a mixed track record. Some folks think it worked well for smoking, but some states have become dependent on those taxes and are seeing declines in tobacco taxes affecting their state budgets.
The soda tax hasn't appeared to work as well where it's been used, and it's unlikely that they'll be able to raise the taxes to the point where demand becomes truly elastic--restaurants make huge profits on soft drinks, too.
The shopping center nearest us just got a 1% increase on sales tax (on everything except food, I think) so they can help pay for Scheels to build a huge new store, complete with a Ferris Wheel inside and put up a parking garage where the current Scheels (not small) is. :sigh:
Best line I read all weekend: How can you tell macroeconomists have a sense of humor? They use decimal points.
