Over the New Year, we have transitioned from our 2019 harvest milling wheat to our 2020 harvest milling wheat.

As followers will know from previous blog posts, we carry out a series of controlled baking tests to assess a number of different samples of milling wheat from different farms in order to decide on the wheat with the best qualities and taste for you, our customers! We then purchase around 50 tonnes of wheat to see us through the year until the next harvest comes along.

The 2020 harvest proved a challenging one. Some of you will have watched my videos showing Samples A and B being put through their paces. Sadly, sample A which was the front runner failed some all-important mycotoxin tests. This was a sample from Cambridgeshire, so we were mightily disappointed, as was the farmer!

Introducing Adrian Steele & Chapel Farm, Netherton

After some further searching we received samples from Adrian Steele’s farm – Chapel Farm, Netherton, Worcestershire. We were delighted with the test bake results and so, we have now introduced his Mulika 2020 crop into production.

The Steele family has been growing wheat at Chapel Farm, in the Vale of Evesham Worcestershire, since the 1930’s. It’s deep alluvial clay soils are suited for traditional mixed farming,  and the farm became certified organic with the Soil Association in the 1980’s. Cattle and sheep graze the clover rich pastures and the mixture of crops include vegetables and flowers,  plums, Spelt wheat, milling rye, milling oats, and wheat varieties suitable for biscuits and bread. The high conservation values of the farm can be enjoyed by the public via a network of bridle ways and footpaths.

The Results

It is always great to also be able to showcase the flour and some of our customer’s fantastic bread baking skills. Here are some photos of loaves made by Stewart Travers using the 2020 harvest Prior’s White & Prior’s Rye flours.

Buy our 2020 harvest flours here! Please note – our product photos are not yet updated with the new harvest farm information.

Our apologies for the lack of updates from Prior’s Flour HQ! The New Year has seen lively shop and online flour sales, so thank you to everyone for your continued interest and business!

At the end of 2020, we completed an important piece of planned maintenance, the replacement of the Fantail Stocks and Blades. This critical piece of infrastructure enables the mill to turn into wind 24 x 7 x 365.

It works by catching gusts of wind which are blowing at any angle other than 0 & 180 degrees – so it stops when the mill is facing directly into the wind!

The fantail blades were originally made of separate boards of red deal (pine), but during the restoration of the mill, they were replaced with marine-grade plywood sheets. These proved very long lasting, but did not look quite correct.

Our millwright cut and shaped new Fanstocks – seen here made from Balau. This timber will last many years and is highly resistant to rot. The timber was then painted ready for installation.

Each of the old Fanblades were then removed, one by one – here you can see only two blades left! The fantail is not only critical to the safety of the mill, but also has to operate with a fine degree of balancing and precision. When the mill has to respond to a sudden change of wind direction (for instance in a storm), the fantail will turn at 30 – 40rpm – a blur, so it has to be perfectly balance and run true!

Here we see the new fanstocks being fitted and installed before the fanblades are fitted into each fanstock.

And finally, the completed job – the new fantail fitted with its tie-rods (which stiffen the blades) illuminated at night. You can see the joints of the fanblades – each board beautifully finished, running at 90 degrees to the fanstocks! Our millwright worked with old photos and the remaining fragment of the original fanblade and fanstock we have from the mill from the 19th Century to ensure that the angles and sizes are as close to the original measurements as possible!

Our thanks to millwrights Paul Kemp and Cam Southcott for their excellent work.

The Mill Shop will close on Thursday 17th December and re-open on the 7th January 2021. We will not accept any more mail orders after the 17th December for delivery before Christmas. Our mail order service will re-open on Tuesday 5th January 2021.

Well, what a year! None of us here at Prior’s Flour HQ could have imagined, even contemplated, what a tumultuous year 2020 would have been. We have been very fortunate to be able to meet a need, your needs, and somehow, scaled up our operations to serve many more customers. We have met new friends and equally, continued to support long standing friends. We would like to thank everyone for your patience, understanding and continued enjoyment of our shared passion of baking!

Thank you once again to you for your business. We have exciting plans for 2021 to enable us to continue to scale-up our business so that we can hold more stock and thus be able to both serve our shop customers more quickly and get our mail order fulfilment faster. Watch this space!

We wish you a Happy Christmas and every good wish for brighter times in 2021.

In our previous post, we explored the process we use to secure samples of wheat from our farmers and clean the grain ready for milling and test baking. In this post, we look at the test baking process, bringing the test doughs together and assessing how the doughs perform during the kneading, stretching & folding stages of bread making.

Knowing what you’re working with..!

To ensure that we carry out baking tests that are meaningful – ie, we have a benchmark by which to compare the new wheat samples / flours to, we test two new samples of flour alongside our existing Prior’s White Flour. This is a flour I am well used to working with (baking with it most weeks), so I know how it performs – how it hydrates, how it stretches, tightens up, how it proves and how I conjure oven spring!

So, my tests are rather ‘clinical’ – to ensure that the new flours are tested in exactly the same way.

I start off with the two new flours clearly labelled with my control (the current White Priors Flour):

The video below tells more of this stage:

Assessing how the dough / flours are performing

Once the dough has been brought together and we have completed the kneading process, it is possible to begin to notice differences in the way the flours are performing – how the dough takes on water, how quickly it tensions when you work with it, surface bubble activity indicating CO2 production etc. The video below tells the story:

In our next post, we will follow the process to the baking stage and see what the results look like!

Firstly, our apologies for the recent radio silence from Priors Flour HQ! A well needed holiday in September followed by a very busy period of customer orders has meant much of our time has been milling and packing flour.

However, along with the milling, we are also finding time to assess samples of 2020 harvest wheat to decide which parcel of wheat we will buy to provide you with your wheat flours – wholemeal, white, wheaten meal and the base for all our flour mixes as we go forward in to 20201.

You will have heard that this year has been extremely challenging for our farmers given the weather. As a result, we have had fewer samples from our East Anglian farmers to try. I am pleased to say that we are now assessing two promising samples, so in this post and the next post, I explain what goes on as we clean, mill and test bake the wheat samples:

Arrival of the wheat samples

We receive samples from our farmers in the state in which they come off the combine – full of chaff, straw, seeds from other plants and dust.

We can tell a good deal from the colour of the berries (grains) and the old fashioned ‘chew’ test where by chewing a mouthful of grains you can break down the starch, swallow the bran and be left with a ball of gluten!

We also get a laboratory test from the farmer telling us the amount of protein in the grain, the bushel weight, the amount of admix (seeds / muck) and the falling hagberg number – the test used to assess the level of α-amylase activity in the grain (how much the starch in the grain has started to become sugar).

We request around 20kgs of the samples we like the look of from the farmer and then, in the next stage, clean the grain.

Cleaning the Grain

In this short video, I explain how we prepare the grain for milling:

In the next blog post, we’ll look out the process we follow to test bake the samples of wheat, using our current flours as a ‘control’.