Greetings (as I write this) on a stunning Saturday, at least here at Priors Flour HQ! A reminder that tomorrow, the 11th May 2025, we celebrate National Mills Weekend with our Bread Creche Event. The event starts at 2pm and we are open until 5pm.

There is a good wind forecast, so the mill should be working all afternoon, a number of people have confirmed they will bring their dough to bake off in the Wood Fired Oven at 3pm.

Tea, coffee and cakes will be served all afternoon from the mill shop along with all our usual flours, honey and oat products.

If you can join us, come and say “hello”, join the bread bakers conversations or simply enjoy a tour of the mill and a cup of tea. Please park on the roadside as the mill yard will be rather busy.

Come and join us on Sunday 11th May from 2pm to 5pm for “Bread Creche” – your chance to talk and bake real bread!

To celebrate National Mills Weekend 2025, we’re firing up the Wood Fired Oven (ready at 3pm), so why not bring your dough ready to bake off? Over a cup of tea (or coffee), talk real bread with fellow bakers, get answers to those bread questions you’ve been desperate to ask. We’ll be talking hydrations, flour, autolyse, dough temperature, shaping, moulding, oven springing and much more!

The mill will be open and, wind permitting, working, the shop will be open and we will be serving tea, coffee and cakes.

The event is free, although, we’d be grateful for the odd donation to support the ongoing maintenance of the mill.

Other mills in our area are also open on Sunday 11th May – locally, Wicken Windmill, Burwell Windmill and you can view the Swaffham Prior Smock Mill from the outside.

If you’d like to bring dough to bake-off, please, ideally, let us know in advance (send us a message here) so we can plan the space in the wood fired oven!

Happy Easter to you! We hope you are enjoying the Bank Holiday break and the great food and drink which accompanies our Easter celebrations.

We are pleased to introduce to you the farmers who grew 50% of the high protein grain which currently goes into our White and Wholemeal Organic Bread Flours. As many of you will know, we work hard to promote the “field to fork” journey that accompanies your flour. You will equally be aware from our previous posts of the challenges experienced by our UK farmers in relation to the 2024 wheat harvest.

We were lucky to secure 50% of our 2024 milling wheat from a UK source and even more lucky that the farm in question is a Norfolk farm situated close to the North Norfolk coast at Deepdale (near Brancaster).

The stunning photo above shows the farm with views looking towards the salt marsh and North Sea beyond.

The ethos of Anna Biesty and her family who own and run Deepdale Farm chime deeply with our own here at The Priors Flour.

Deepdale Farm over looks Brancaster Harbour on the North Norfolk Coast. This family, organic, arable farm is committed to regenerative, nature friendly farming practices. Since converting to an organic system in 2021, they have worked to improve their soil health by using clover leys, cover crops and hosting a flying flock of sheep. This has enabled them to produce high quality Mulika wheat. Across Deepdale Farm there are features to support biodiversity – wildflower mixes, cultivated areas for arable plants, beetle banks, wild bird food mixtures and ponds.

If anyone would like to visit, they will be hosting Open Farm Sunday on 1st June 2025. This is a free event suitable for the whole family.

We intend to work to develop our relationship with Deepdale and we hope to secure milling wheat from them in the future.

In the meantime, you can enjoy their grain (along with the 50% imported wheat which gives our current flours some added protein) by selecting our flours and grains.

With Easter approaching, we update today to advise that our mail order service will be suspended between the 11th – 21st April inclusive.

Orders received by the 10th April will be packed and dispatched, so if you would like flour before Easter, please get your orders in!

The mill shop will be open on the 13th (2pm to 5pm) and 17th (9am to 1pm) April as usual. With reduced staff on the 13th April, we will not be able to do mill tours.

We would like to wish you a Happy Easter and, here’s hoping the good weather continues until the bank holiday break.

We’re delighted to announce that we have secured a number of tonnes of a new variety of organic wheat. The variety is Bamford, a winter wheat which has been bred, trialled, scaled up and recently made available for farmers to grow.

We are delighted with the results in terms of milling and baking properties. The grain is soft (protein ~9%), mills well and produces a lovely, silky, creamy white flour.

We have been enjoying baking with it and this weekend’s treat was scones!

Take a look at these delicious scones. Without wishing to get embroiled in cream or jam first.. the scones turned out beautifully (made with The Priors Stoneground Organic Plain Flour adding Baking Powder) – well risen, light texture, bags of flavour.

We use the same flour to produce our Stoneground Organic Self Raising Flour, so why not try it for cakes too?

I always hand bake my scones – rubbing the butter into the flour, in my experience this transforms the texture. Machine mixing toughens up the crumb structure and the scones don’t rise as well.

Enjoy – stoneground flours for your cakes and pastries. The flavour and texture is so rewarding!