How a Local Mill’s Summer Camp Is Changing Our Relationship with Bread

PORTLAND MONTHLY

A look inside Camp Camas, an invite-only gathering for advocates of local grain.

EARLY ONE SUMMER MORNING, I dropped my kids off at day camp in Portland and drove the couple of hours to a one-room schoolhouse on the edge of Junction City, to a camp of my own. 

As I pulled up, the sun was just far enough over the horizon to make the dew glisten. Sunflowers swayed in the field, and baskets of bread already graced long tables. Campers were ambling up from tents scattering the property, ready for some pastries prepared for them, for a change, rather than by them. 

More than 45 bakers had gathered on this day in 2019 for the first-ever Camp Camas, an event packed with demos, field walks, and classes led by many of the best in a growing grain revival. And it felt like a revival of sorts, people gathering under big tents in a field outside a schoolhouse to tout the virtues of all things local grain. The lessons learned at this now-regular happening are part of a wider regenerative food movement that is helping to shape the way America thinks about great bread. 

Read More

How Small Scale Millers Like Nan Kohler Are Changing Our Flour

Bake From Scratch

I first met Nan Kohler at a grain conference. In a room packed with wheat breeders, grass seed farmers, and bakers, Nan introduced herself as a miller. Not a baker who occasionally tried making flour, or a grass seed farmer who needed to figure out how to get their product to market, but a miller, plain and simple.

She told me about Grist & Toll, a small milling operation that she’d opened in 2012 in Los Angeles. I’d never thought about how flour is made or the technicalities of turning a seed into the stuff I bake with. I knew immediately that I wanted to visit Nan at her mill.

READ MORE

Spaghetti Vigil

Communal Table

Kim and I met in 1988. That was definitely the year because we were sitting in the backseat of Joie’s VW Rabbit, the three of us sounding the cry of what I am is what I am by Edie Brickell at top decibel. The windows were wide open, and the smell of gardenias and pungent Spanish moss drifted in as we ambled through the old Florida neighborhood.

READ MORE