Author(s): Adam Leonti; Katie Parla; Marc Vetri (Foreword by)

Food & Drink

In Flour Lab, the new definitive book on flour, chef Adam Leonti shows you the best tools and techniques for making flour that is better-tasting and more nutritious than pre-ground flours. He gives expert tips on where to source wheat, how to mill at home, and how to work with different grains. Here, too, he specifically addresses the idiosyncrasies of working with freshly milled flour as opposed to what's found on supermarket shelves. Twenty recipes for breads, pasta, pizza, cakes, and pastries serve as a practical instruction for using fresh flour in a variety of ways.

Adam Leonti is passionately convinced that food made with freshly-milled grains tastes better, and that it is better for us and the environment. In Flour Lab, he not only demystifies the process of miling your own flours, he shows you how you can choose specific grain varieties—primarily but not exclusively wheat—to achieve extraordinary results in everything from bread and pizza to pasta, pastry, cookies, and cakes.

For those of us who don’t have a local flour mill to draw on, Leonti provides guidance on choosing your own countertop mill, both for home kitchens and for professional kitchens where greater capacity is needed. He’s also excited about and generous in recommending different wheats for different purposes, and offers a set of questions to ask local farmers and suppliers to determine if their wheats will serve best.  For each section of the book he offers milling advice (pasta, for instance, can use flour that is less finely ground than you might need for bread).

The promise of more intricately flavored baked goods, whether they be pizzas or croissants, is compelling and Leonti’s enthusiasm is convincing. His recipes run an appealing gamut from ciabatta and sourdough loaves to lasagne sheets, gnocchi, pizza Napoletana, puff pastry, shortbread cookies, scones, and sponge cake.