Flour is Flavor
Speaking with Dawn Woodward
Dear Readers,
I have a special treat for you today: an interview with Dawn Woodward, whose new baking book, Flour is Flavor, should be at the top of your holiday lists, for getting & giving.
Dawn runs Evelyn’s Crackers, a whole grain bakery in Toronto. I first met her when she and Naomi Duguid taught at class at The Kneading Conference, and I’ve been a fan of Dawn’s ever since. Her no-nonsense approach to prioritizing regional whole grains is fantastic. As she writes in her new book, Flour is Flavor, when she began her culinary career, farm-to-table cooking & nose-to-tail utilization of food was popular. Working in pastry, she used fresh fruits grown nearby, and fine dairy products, but flour was anonymous. That changed when Naomi gave her a bag of Red Fife flour. Stunned by its flavor and story, Dawn and her husband Ed sought and found Ontario sources of Red Fife, spelt, buckwheat, rye and barley.
Playing around in their kitchen, crackers responded the best to the unsifted flours, and their business, named for their daughter, was born. Using only heritage grains sustainably grown in Ontario was an unusual choice – how many bakeries can make that kind of commitment? It was important to Dawn and Ed because they wanted to support change in agriculture and help shape a better future for their daughter and her generation.
I love Dawn’s book because her recipes are very good, and I can apply the grain and baking information to anything I touch in the kitchen. It is a joy to hold, too! This slim book is one of a very few cookbooks that celebrate regional grain growing, and teach people how to handle and understand stone ground flours – especially ones that are NOT wheat.
Dawn and I spoke on computer phone last week. She was at her bakery, which is about 1000 square feet, and has two Ostiroller mills, a small one she’s selling, and a larger one she uses. She has mixers, convection ovens, and room for small hands-on baking classes. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Amy Halloran: I didn't realize you even had a mill. It's been a while since we talked!
Dawn Woodward: I bought the little one from Chris (Wooding from Ironwood Organics) in late spring. But it’s just too small and the hard red comes out too sandy. So, I just got the slightly bigger one. I realized I needed a sifter because I do so much buckwheat. The sifters are for the buckwheat, not the other grains. (Buckwheat clings to its hulls and needs to have most of these sifted out as the hull is indigestible.)
I really wanted a New American Stone Mill, but the investment just it didn't make sense. If it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago, when I was thinking about milling flour not just for baking, but also for sale in a larger space – maybe. But now it just doesn't make sense for me.
AH: Because of the price of space in Toronto?
DW: Right. The Ostirollers do a good job for what I need. I’m not a mill.
AH: Do you sell any flour?
DW: I do. When I have a baking class, people will buy the grains and then the goal is with the bigger Ostiroller, to start selling some flour because of the baking book. People are always asking oh, where can I get this, and I think at this point actually you can buy spelt and rye and Red Fife at a lot of places now. But people want good cornmeal or buckwheat or a different type of whole wheat, right? They want to have individual varieties.
AH: Tell me about the classes. Are they right at the bakery?
DW: The classes are at the bakery. I've only had three so far and I have to put up a bunch more for the new year on the website. So far, they've just been sweet baking. I'll probably do some bread ones over January and February.
AH: Are you having good turn outs?
DW: Yes, six to eight people each class, and eight is my max because it's very hands on. I'm not demoing. So far they've been fun. People have really enjoyed it, and they've been so surprised at how easy it is. And then they learn a little bit about grain, which is nice.
AH: Good. And how many markets are you doing right now?
DW: Just one right now and then I have another one in the summer. And because my rent has doubled, I have to open for retail.
AH: Wow.
DW: So that's also for the new year. I do have a full-time employee now, but I'll be hiring other people for retail.
AH: Do you have a plan for how often you'll be open?
DW: I think I just want it two days a week for now and then we'll ease into a Saturday because I'll be at the market, or I have to find somebody to take my spot at the market. So that's just going to take a while to build in. For now, I think Thursday, Friday should work, and the neighborhood I'm in has really changed. The bakery around the corner from me is incredibly busy now. A couple of years ago retail wasn't really possible here, but things change so we'll see.
I've tried to use this space well. I've had a couple of pop ups here, and I rented out the space for community. oriented pop ups. So I want to continue with that, too. You know, space in Toronto is so expensive, so I try to make the space accessible for people to use.
AH: And that helps make people aware of the bakery too. Are you going to have beverages also?
DW: I think I'm going to do drip coffee and people will serve themselves. The bakery on the corner has an amazing coffee program. And I just don't want to put in a machine and have a barista, all that.
I also want more things that people are buying to take home, not necessarily take away and eat for breakfast or lunch. I would like to be more like Kim of Small Food, offering some pantry goods and in the summer offer some vedge, because there's nothing like that in this area. I'm in an area that's heavily condo-ized. So it's also the question of do people actually even cook anymore? I don't know, right?
AH: Maybe once a week, maybe special occasions or something. Who knows.
DW: I don't know. But maybe they'll at least make a salad or could buy some eggs. We'll see how it ends up and what sells.
AH: Tell me more about the neighborhood.
DW: Liberty Village used to be very industrial, light industry. They weren't building ships, more like lighter manufacturing. So, there are some really great brick buildings, but then because Toronto's Toronto, most of them are torn down for really terrible condos.
There’s couple of buildings left. I'm in one of the last rows that's only three stories high. A long time ago, this used to be some kind of clothing repair because there are you see little holes in the linoleum where they were attaching tables. There are two nice size apartments above me. But all the developers are waiting for people to sell these units so they can take them down and build a condo.
AH: So this is not a forever kind of place.
DW: I don't think so. The condo companies have been trying for a long time. Eventually everyone has a price, right?
AH: Indeed. Is it a big commute for you?
DW: No, I bike. It's less than 3 miles.
AH: Wonderful.
DW: It's just my bike home is all uphill. I wish it were the other way, that my bike to work would be uphill.
AH: Right! Let’s talk about your book, which is super readable and physically nice to touch. And you have great information. It's just a really, really good book.
DW: Thanks.
AH: Tell me how how it came to be. When did you start thinking about it?
DW: A long time. I've had people asking, why aren't you writing a book? You should write a book. You need to write something. And I'm just too busy working. And also I I have no platform, and I'm friends with Naomi, and I know that even for somebody as respected as she is, it's still a lot to publish a book. Each year there's less money in it and you have to pay for this and there's no more book tours. And so it's kind of a brutal industry. That’s just not what I want to put my energy into.
Plus I have such mixed feelings about social media and I'm don't like getting up there saying, look at what I'm doing, look at what I'm doing. But then the woman who publishes these books, she said why don't you write a book on buckwheat? I said sure, because these books are small. When we were talking, we realized it might be a little too niche. So we said let’s do whole grain baking.
I already had a bunch of small home baker sized recipes from all the workshops I've taught. That was easy to put together. But then I was struggling to finish it and I needed somebody to test recipes. So, my friend Cameron Stauch tested all the recipes, he did some editing and pulled everything together.
I absolutely would not have a book without Cameron at all. He was so, so, helpful.
AH: Does he write other things?
DW: He has written a beautiful book on vegetarian Vietnamese cooking. He has lived all around the world and has a chef background. He does a bunch of work for the Oxford Food Symposium. He wanted to learn how to bake and he was super intrigued by what I was doing. Of course, we met through Naomi because she knows everyone.
AH: What a good partner to find!
DW: Right. So that worked out really well.
AH: When did you two start to work together?
DW: I started the book before the pandemic. But in the last two years it really got pulled together with Cameron because it was just sitting in my Google. Originally it was titled Unsifted. It was just sitting there, and I couldn't bring myself to work on it. There are so many other things going on in the world, and I kind of talked myself out of it.
AH: Well, I’m glad it’s here because there are so few cookbooks that promote regional grains. And there's a lot of great information in yours that isn't in others. It's really useful.
DW: Thanks. The teaching I've always done is always been more home baker focused in that I want it to be very easy. I'm not about technique. There are other people that teach technique. I find the idea of using these grains and trying to see grain as a local food can be enough information for people to take in.
Putting it in the context of something super familiar and something that they can whip up a batch of is going to get the message across more. That’s definitely led me down the more sweet route as opposed to savory just because I think in North America everyone can make chocolate chip cookies, right? The reason I use so much rye and barley and buckwheat is because that's what's grown here.
AH: Tell me about your work with the Bread Lab.
DW: I've learned so much at the lab, about the whole back end of everything right from Big AG and patents and breeding and genetics and soil and commodity systems and all of that. Plus I’ve had the ability to go to the lab and play, have all that stuff at your fingertips.
My ethos is to keep it simple, make it about the grain. Keep it approachable and then kind of figure out how to use that as a way to open people's minds. To show what it means to use local grains and why it is such a pressing issue.
It’s bigger than using local tomatoes, right? Wheat is a commodity item, and I don't think we're going to change the system. But there's the capacity to build so many parallel small regional systems in grains. And with that, I want to broaden people's perspective and palette beyond wheat. There’s so much more to grains than wheat.
AH: How does climate change figure in your thinking?
DW: I think climate change is a really huge driver. I think this is the doomsayer part of me, but I think we're going to see huge changes in the next five to ten years. We are at serious tipping points with our climate and already I see it with the farmers I deal with. A lot of the spring harvests aren't great. Farmers are trying to change more to winter wheat. The commodity market is a wild ride as we all saw during the pandemic, when the price of white flour tripled. Why do people keep investing in that?
I keep learning more about soil and the need for biodiversity, and the need for keeping seed and identity preserved and seed saving. You're not looking for a grain farmer. I'm looking for a soil farmer. There's so little community these days. This (search and work) is how you build community.
The best part of my job is dealing with my customers and my suppliers. What a joy to go to a farm and and talk and let the farmer just nerd out on the grains, or talk about the soil or look and see what’s on the farm. Do they have wild bees? How many bird species are on the farm? And then also talk to them about the changing rural landscape.
In Ontario there's so much development that the rural landscape is changing because there's just they're extracting all the stuff for making cement and digging everything up. We're building, building, building, building, building. Their landscape is changing and we have a terrible premier and you know he's trying to destroy our green belts.
Let's face it, every farmer I deal with is white, so there's also the problem of lack of diversity, lack of access to land. Certain grains are grown that fit much more into a European culture as opposed to other cultures. Part of that is climate, part of it not. Corn should play a much bigger role in North American baking. This is this is an, THE, indigenous cereal. And most bakers don't use corn.
Ed is picking up the corn today, not me. I'm getting three different colors of Flint corn and the guy I get it from, Ken’s Garlic, he rematriates seed to Indigenous people. He knows the history. He also deals with more recent, modern Flint and dent varieties, but his heart is in the right place. These are the people I want to have in my life.
He gets some of his seed from Keith from Creative Botanics, whose depth of knowledge is crazy. And he is very political and is not into seed patenting and is very anti-commodity. But he doesn't want to just preserve heirlooms, right? He's doing a lot of breeding and crossing and one of the flints I got last year was a new variety from him. So like, that's really cool too. He's about preservation of seed and preservation of certain farming techniques, but not he's also very, I think, cutting edge right and looking to change things up, to adapt to our new climate. To have these people who are willing to spread their knowledge with me, it's incredible.
AH: I'm remembering the rye that Chris (Wooding, of Ironwood Organics) was growing when I was out there this summer. Tell me about that rye.
DW: Oh, that’s the best rye ever, the Estonian Variety Sangaste. It’s a tall stemmed rye, smells like honey and mills, so incredibly fine and beautiful and the baking performance is excellent. It holds a lot of water. And Laura Valli (Rye scholar who got her PhD at the Bread Lab), of course, taught me her method for Estonian rye, which is where you take all the water and put it into the sour. Then you're just adding flour to the sour as opposed to most Eastern European methods. Her rye sour is super liquidy and incredibly sweet, and then combined with this rye I had customers who noticed right away the flavor difference of the Sangaste.
I just want to let people know that there’s varieties of rye, and you should ask your farmer what variety they grow, and if they don't know talk to them about maybe growing a different variety. One time at the Bread Lab I think I tested 20 different madeleines made with 20 different rye varieties and saw big differences in flavor, and how big the little bump was on the madeleine. And this is just rye, which is such a throwaway grain in our culture.
To me, it's one of the most fascinating grains. In my bakery it's my pastry flour. Why would you use white pastry flour when you can use rye?
AH: You find that it swaps universally?
DW: It does. I mean your crust is going to be a little more delicate, but it's soft, right? So, if you want it for financiers or madeleines or cakes, it's great. And on the other hand, it also makes this really sturdy, dense bread. And then it makes a whole bunch of stuff in between. I put it my chocolate chip cookie is half rye. It's gorgeous with the the dark chocolate.
AH: But you wouldn't do whole rye?
DW: I’m constantly getting different heirloom wheats from Chris. So I just kind of swap it up right? I've done whole rye chocolate chip cookies and they're really good. But there is something also about wheat gives a little crispness to the cookies, and I also I'm a big fan of combining grains. Like you know, the sum of is greater than its parts thing, it's fun. And again, this is what I have to play with. So I do, and see what happens.
AH: Talk more about working with Chris and that rye.
DW: We were getting it from Shelly, Against the Grain farm. She retired and sold what she had left. Chris got some from me and from other bakers and has been growing it out for a couple of years now.
AH: It was so tall. It was like standing next to a person. It was so neat.
DW: He would send me pictures of deer bedding down in it for the night. So that was nice. And I guess a lot of it lodged but it didn’t really hit the ground, it just sort of broke off and then he was still able to harvest it.
AH: Oh good.
DW: I thought that was really interesting, right? Because a lot of farmers stay away from the tall stuff because if it lodges, you're lost, right? He's great. Like, I mean, you want to go down a rabbit hole, he will take you there. So that's been fun. We have a really nice relationship. And he and Mary have become friends.
AH: Tell me about other farmers you work with.
DW: Paul Salanki from Loonsong Farm is actually coming to put the motor on the new mill and he's going to install it for me. But he doesn't have a farm right now. I was getting the Redeemer wheat and Japanese buckwheat from him, and he had some of the Sangaste rye from Shelley. He was renting land and he lost that, and we'll see if he gets any land back.
One of the first farmers I've dealt with is Peter Leahy of Merrylynd Farm. He raises cattle and chicken and grows pumpkins, and does maple syrup. He grows a lot of Red Fife and spelt. So those are the three farmers.
Every year the grain chain becomes a little bit more delicate. It's not growing like it should. We'll see what happens. I know Peter says that when his neighbors sell, it's a conventional farm that comes in to grow corn and soy. I don't know what's going to happen. Chris is probably going to retire soon, and Paul doesn't have land and Peter's in his early 60s, so we’ll see.
AH: That’s stark. We need more farmers.
DW: We do, and the trend here – for many reasons, but one of the reasons is land is so expensive. There are more and more market farmers which is great because you only need a couple of acres. And the farmers market scene is really good here. But in the end, if we don't have good farmers growing some core things, we're in trouble.
AH: I mean they’re called staple crops for a reason.
DW: And each year the government makes it a little harder. They keep changing the language about seed saving. It used to be a right. Now it's a privilege, but it's no longer a right. They just tweaked that language a little bit.
So that’s not great and we don't have a bread lab here, so that it's a problem. I have a sheep farmer I'm getting some rye from now. He wants to transition into grains. He's found a seed cleaner, but he doesn’t know where to get these unique seed varieties, because it’s hard to do. And he doesn't have the equipment. Whereas Chris has the tiny plot combine and also he doesn't have, 200 sheep on his farm that he's also trying to raise, so that’s tricky. He has some triticale (a cross between wheat and rye) which I'm going to get this year.
AH: Are you milling everything you use?
DW: The only thing that I don't mill is the Redeemer. I still have some bags of that, and I give that to the bakery around the corner, broad flower, because they have the 40 inch New American stone mill. Because that's a hard wheat, it does a beautiful job. But I'm hoping that this slightly larger Ostiroller will mill the hard reds, like Rouge de Bordeaux, and a couple different types of Red Fife.
But I like the Redeemer nice and fine. But I'm down to my last five bags, so it's kind of a moot point. I think it’s going to be a couple of years, I think before Paul gets some land again.
AH: So you'll adjust whatever you make to whatever you can get.
DW: Yes. The one thing that's going to be a bummer is I'm making a lot of whole grain brioche and that really does require a strong wheat. Ontario just doesn't grow a lot of strong spring wheats and Paul was the one. So maybe I stop making brioche and all the related products. That's fine. There's other things, right? This is the constant evolution of my bakery.
I'm excited to use triticale, and maybe at some point I'll be using very little wheat, and doing a lot more rye and barley and things like that.
AH: Do you make crackers anymore?
DW: I need to change my business name. I make one type, whole grain spelt, sometimes with some barley. Sourdough. Fennel. Olive oil. That's it. And then I make digestives. So that that is it for the crackers and it's great. I still sell a lot. But we don't deal with wholesale accounts anymore, which means I can package them in plain coffee bags. I write in my terrible left-handed scrawl crackers across the bag. That's that, right? No spending money on plastic packaging, no spending money on labels.
AH: Good.
DW: So that makes me happy.
AH: Thanks, Dawn, for talking with me!
DW: Thank you, Amy.
Buy this beautiful book here and here, or ask your bookstore to order!
Loved this interview. I always thought your voices go so well together. ❤️
I’m a huge fan of all things Evelyn’s Crackers! Thanks for this, Amy.