Whole Grain Goodness

I just got returned from a soul recharge week with so many friends old and new in Skagit Valley, Washington at the WSU Bread Lab, mastermind of Dr. Stephen Jones. It has made me re-think my whole focus on heirloom wheat quite frankly. To learn about Steve’s thoughtful breeding approach gives me assurance that he is making healthy wheats for the people. In fact I ate only his wheat all week and felt like a million bucks.

We will be planting many of his varieties in Boulder County this month. Steve breeds high yielding varieties to complement their place of planting, be it drought wrought varieties for Colorado, fungus and mold hardy wheat for the Pacific NW or anything in between. They are selecting some wheat for unique color (I brought some purples and blues home that we will plant this week). Dr. Jones is in the business of soil health, including perennial wheats. His Salish Blue is out of this world delicious and has a robust seed size. Imagine planting wheat once and harvesting for multiple years with no soil disruption. Steve and his team are working with this climate chaos through their work of increasing yield per acre and advocating for whole grains. If you think about it, you can increase your yields by 30% just by eating every part of the wheat berry and not sifting 30% off to discard.

We assembled some of the best bakers from around the globe to go play in Skagit. Steve has a full baking lab with every kind of wheat in the world, all sorts of equipment and perhaps the coolest oven I've ever seen made from an old steel buoy that once floated in the Puget Sound. There are old staves from leaky Spanish Oak casks that he uses to fire the oven, and he sent me home with one. We also loaded up a 10 lb King Salmon into the oven and smoked it on a big cedar plank. 100% whole fish baby.

Sarah Owens, Guy Frenkel, Jim Williams, Kimberly Bell, Nicky Guisto, Maurizio Negrini, Mona Esposito, Louie Prager, Merri Metcalf, and some super cool phd students just loved the every living heck out of each other for a few days and shared recipes and stories. 100% whole grain Ukrainian Easter Bread, 100% whole grain Jerusalem Bagels, 100% whole grain pita, 100% whole grain baguettes, 100% whole grain malt extract, 100% whole grain crackers, 100% whole rye breads, 100% whole spelt breads (made with beluga lentils, black garlic and blue corn), 100% whole grain ciabatta, 100% whole grain pizza, 100% whole grain sprouted fermented chocolate chip cookies....and a whole lot more.

Watch as this story unfolds through our new products and hard left turn into whole grains at Moxie in the coming months.
Oh yeah, and we rode horses, played music and sailed boats....and there was local whisky.

Let's hear a little Peter Tosh today. Legalize it...whole grain baking that is. Wheat baby cuz weed is already legal.

Legalize It