Style Blueprint: 3 Female-Run Southern Brands to Know in 2021
Jennifer Lapidus, Stephanie Summerson Hall, Katherine Stratton Miller and Rowanne McKnight have one thing in common: they are some of the most inspiring and interesting female Southern makers of the moment. Respectively, they rethink the connection between farming and baking, how to artfully entertain and how art is consumed. Collectively, they create products we don’t want to live without.
Carolina Ground Flour, Estelle Colored Glass and Julia Kipling continue to grow in popularity, and we’d like to introduce you to the women behind these budding brands.
Jennifer Lapidus, Founder & General Manager of Carolina Ground Flour
Jennifer Lapidus was a baker before she started a micro mill that specializes in locally grown grains. Nearly three decades ago, she was an apprentice baker producing Flemish naturally leavened bread known as desem. This whole-grain, naturally leavened bread begins with freshly milled whole-grain flour. Learning to mill and understanding the significance of fresh stone-ground flour — for “flavor, tooth, and vibrance” — was, for Jennifer, part of becoming a baker. Carolina Ground Flour is an expansion of this learning, understanding and appreciation. The North Carolina mill uses ancient technology to deliver stone-ground and cold-milled unbleached bread flour, pastry flour and rye flour.
Baking bread became one of the most talked-about hobbies last year, and Carolina Ground saw an uptick in sales to at-home bakers. Although some have traded their culinary pastimes for other ventures, many have become lifelong bakers. Those who fall into the latter category will be as eager to get their hands on a copy of Jennnifer’s upcoming book as they were to get their hands on her flour. It is Jennifer’s mission to “connect the farmer, miller, and baker — and through the baker, bring the story of their daily bread back to their community.” Southern Ground: Reclaiming Flavor through Stone-Milled Flour includes 80 recipes from 20 acclaimed craft bakeries in the South that showcase superior cold stone-milled flour and highlights the importance of baking with locally farmed ingredients.
“We are part of the revival of regional stone milling, and those of us across the country (and the world) are taking a different approach: treating grain as an agricultural product with flavor and place, as opposed to a fungible commodity,” says Jennifer. Image: Erin Adams Photography
This spring, look for Jennifer’s upcoming book: Southern Ground: Reclaiming Flavor through Stone-Milled Flour. Image: Erin Adams Photography
Tell us the story of starting your brand.
After running my bakery for 14 years, milling in-house and baking bread in a wood-fired brick oven (while raising my daughter in sync), I stepped away from baking only to be pulled back in as a miller. This was 2008, and the price of wheat had just skyrocketed, which highlighted the reality that all of the bakers I knew in Western North Carolina (including myself) were disconnected from the farmers growing our grain/flour, which was grown at least 1,000 miles from where we were baking. At the same time, public breeder Dr. David Marshall of the USDA-Agricultural Research Service based in Raleigh, NC, had just released two varieties of regionally adapted bread wheat (after eight years of trialing). Suddenly, we had seed varieties available that could withstand the humidity of the Southeast. The Southeast typically grows a godly amount of wheat, but soft (pastry) wheat, not hard (bread) wheat. I connected the dots and began Carolina Ground.
We are a micro mill that cold-stone mills our flour and produces around 2,000 pounds of flour a day. Most flour mills are huge — 100,000 pounds of flour a day is considered a “small” industrial mill. The milling industry processes their grain to flour with steel rollers that separate the bran from the germ and endosperm, and they can remove the oily germ and create a shelf-stable product. They are incredibly efficient, but the result is a different product compared to stone-milled flour, which is milled intact. Cold-stone milling means we do not mill above a certain temperature threshold — never above 100°F to protect that oily germ, which is packed with nutrients and flavor. Although we can produce a sifted flour, the oily germ is crushed into the flour, so even our most sifted flour is a creamy hue, never white.
This year, more people embraced the idea of the home chef — how did that impact your business?
It was insane. Our online sales were crazy, and many of the people seeking our product had zero baking experience. I was editing my book at the time, and it really made me slow down and think about baking from the perspective of someone who knew nothing. Up until that point, our online retail customers were mostly avid home bakers. It was a big learning curve on many fronts for us but all good stuff — other than this really sad pandemic.
Carolina Ground Flour is based in Asheville, NC, but they are moving into their own building in Hendersonville (about 25 minutes from Asheville). Their buckwheat is grown on a certified organic acreage in Dayton, VA. Image: Hannah B Lapidus
Learn more about Carolina Ground Flour, shop the products, get recipes and more at carolinaground.com.