Comparative lab results of the following flours provided by Unifine Mill LLC, obtained from Medallion Labs, Minneapolis MN and USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference Legacy Release.

Steve Fulton fondly remembers the bread of his childhood. “The taste was amazing. It was deeply aromatic and had this distinctive nutty flavor. You can’t find bread like that anymore,” he laments.

In a deeply beige conference room at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, baker Craig Ponsford, founder of Artisan Bakers in Sonoma, pauses dramatically to survey the remarkably rapt group before him. His audience is members of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) attending a panel discussion called “The Revolution in Local Grains,” and he’s talking about the ingredients he uses at his two-year-old San Rafael bakery, Ponsford’s Place.

The Unifine mill takes a different approach. The wheat or other grain is blown into a high-speed flywheel, which pulverizes the grain against the rough surface of the container. After one pass, the exploded material blows into a sifting system, producing whole grain flour with a very fine particle size.

I've recently had the experience of working with a uniquely milled set of wheat flours. (A whole grain flour and two other Extraction Flour samples sifted from the same batch of whole grain flour.) They were milled on a Unifine rotary impact mill.  I ran each flour through my standard test bake for 100% whole flours.   I substituted 98% for unbleached white flour in our bakery's standard Sourdough Baguette formulation at 78% hydration.  (The 2% unbleached white was the portion in the starter that seeded the leavening of the dough.)