Going with the Maine Grain
NOTEBOOK-July/August 2009
by Peter A. Smith
Photograph by Natalie Conn
Dean Zoulamis built his oven from scratch: mortar, clay bricks, sand, and a stainless steel Le Panyol core. He stokes the oven with wood from his Bowdoinham farm and bakes crusty, European-style breads inside his Mother Oven. He calls them, “Bread of the peasant in the present.”
“You could say I’m an artist, but I don’t consider myself an artisan bread baker,” Zoulamis says. “When my mother ate my bread, she said, ‘This is what I ate as a young girl growing up in Greece.’ ”
His whole-grain breads (and pizza, a Friday night take-out special) show more than a sense of pre-industrial craftsmanship; they represent just how far the baking renaissance has spread. While Maine is hardly the breadbasket of the east—the United States Department of Agriculture’s last recordable harvest of wheat in Maine was in 1946—dozens of farmers and bakers here have begun the slow effort to revitalize the cultivation of wheat by growing heritage grains and baking artisan breads from them.
“Wheat does capture the imagination,” says Jim Gerritsen, a potato farmer in Bridgewater. “I think it is something we can do. The demand by bakers and eaters is really amazing.”
The demand has spawned everything from a plan to turn a jail into a gristmill in Skowhegan to that town’s annual Kneading Conference, a gathering of professional and home bakers, farmers, millers, and oven-builders. State agricultural researchers secured a multi-year grant to investigate the feasibility of growing more grains in Maine, and commercial, wood-fired ovens have sprouted everywhere from Sargentville to Lyman.
But a short growing season, relatively high rainfall, and slumping wheat prices don’t bode well for the renaissance. Matt Williams, a Linneaus farmer who grows 80 acres of wheat for his Aurora Mills flours, says, “I probably grow half the grain grown in Maine.”
Zoulamis says he tries to buy Maine-grown flours, most of it from the Webb Family Farm. This year he ran out of Maine grain in April. “One challenge is supply,” he says. “The other is consistency. Because it’s not standardized like King Arthur Flour. Every year when the crop comes in, I have to adjust my recipes. Even within the year. It might be a different moisture content throughout the year. It just adds variety to what we’re doing.”
Mother Oven Breadis available at Mother Oven Bakery and Sweet Fern Farm, 88 Carding Machine Road, Bowdoinham (666.3994) as well as at several health-food stores and farmers markets. The Kneading Conference will be held July 30-31 in Skowhegan. Registration and information available at
heartofmaine.org/kneading.
Correction: Because of an editing error, an incorrect nickname was attributed to Mother Oven Bakery's bread in the July/August issue. Zu Bread is baked by a separate company (zubakery.com) in South Freeport.
