Author(s): JENNIFER LAPIDUS

Food & Wine

A highly curated collection of 80 recipes from twenty acclaimed craft bakeries in the South that showcases superior cold stone-milled flour and highlights the importance of baking with locally farmed ingredients.Like a chef-driven restaurant, the Carolina Ground Flour Mill in Asheville, North Carolina, is a baker-driven mill. Jennifer Lapidus's intensely flavorful flour, made from grains grown and cold stone-milled in the heart of the South, is transforming bakeries from Louisiana to North Carolina to Florida. Cold stone-milled flour allows bakers to move away from industrial commodity flour and deliver extraordinary taste, texture, and story.Now, in Southern Ground, Lapidus celebrates the incredible work of bakers all over the South. In Starksville, Mississippi, Troy DeRego's Portuguese biscuits introduce uncommon flavors and textures to this Southern college town. In Atlanta, the Little Tart Bakeshop elevates the Georgia peanut with stone-ground whole-grain spelt flour; and in New Orleans, Levee Baking Co. pairs the flavor of Louisiana cane syrup with Southern-grown Wren's Abruzzi rye.Serving instruction and insight into how to use and enjoy these flavor-forward flours of geographic distinction, Southern Ground harnesses the wisdom and knowledge that our baking community has gained. With detailed profiles on the top Southern bakers and eighty recipes arranged by grain, this is a love story to Southern baking and a call for the home baker to understand the source and makeup of the most important of ingredients- flour.