All You Can Eat: Bakers

Wednesday 12/7

music

Berto and Matt. Latin guitar night. Free, 7pm. The Bebedero, 225 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. thebebedero.com Karaoke with Jenn DeVille. Sign up to sing or just enjoy the tunes. Free, 9pm. Rapture, 303 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. rapturerestaurant.com Open Mic Night. Charlottesville’s longest running open mic night. Free, 9pm. Holly’s Diner, 1221 E. Market St. 234-4436. Wavelength trio. A midweek music boost. Free, 6:30pm. The Whiskey Jar, 227 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. thewhiskeyjarcville.com

stage

Violet. A soaring musical pilgrimage that follows a young woman hoping to transform her life on a 1964 Greyhound bus journey from North Carolina to Oklahoma. $30-33, 7:30pm. Live Arts, 123 E. Water St. livearts.org

classes

Wreath Making. The team at M. Henry Design provides the materials needed to create a beautiful holiday wreath. $55, 4pm. Eastwood Farm and Winery, 2531 Scottsville Rd. eastwoodfarmandwinery.com Wreath Making Workshop. Horticulturist Diane Burns and garden assistants Celina DeBrito and Carolyn Springett teach participants how to make a 14-inch wreath. $115, 9:30am and 1pm. Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards, 5022 Plank Rd., North Garden. pippin hillfarm.com

etc.

Daily Tour of Indigenous Australian Art.

Explore the only museum in the U.S. devoted to Indigenous Australian art. Free, 10:30am and 1:30pm. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA, 400 Worrell Dr. kluge-ruhe.org

Thursday 12/8

music

Holiday Music Series: The Heifetz Interna-

tional Music Institute. Violinists Minchae Kim and SoHyun Ko, violist Jerome McCoy, and cellist Dilshod Narzillaev perform seasonal classics and Yuletide delights. Free, 6pm. Quirk Hotel Charlottesville, 499 W. Main St. quirkhotels.com

stage

Matilda: The Musical. The story of an extraordinary girl who dares to take a stand and change her own destiny. $15-25, 7pm. Belmont Arts Collaborative, 221 Carlton Rd., Ste. 3. dmradventures.com Violet. See listing for Wednesday, December 7. $30-33, 7:30pm. Live Arts, 123 E. Water St. livearts.org

words

MFA Reading Series. Fiction and poetry students from the University of Virginia’s MFA program in creative writing read from their work. Free, 7pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com

classes

Wreath Making Workshop. See listing for Wednesday, December 7. $115, 1pm. Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards, 5022 Plank Rd., North Garden. pippinhillfarm.com

Filling a knead

Local bakers up their game with flour from Deep Roots Milling

By Matt Dhillon

living@c-ville.com

Woodson’s Mill is alive. The green lawn is speckled with people in conversation. There’s smoke from a wood-fired pizza truck, and a number of vendor tables display local food and handcrafts. Rising above the gathering is the four-story, clapboard mill building that has stood there since the 1790s.

Inside the historic building, the sound of the crowd fades into the trickle of the Piney River, the zip of belts and pulleys, and the churning of the steel waterwheel. Underneath and at the heart of those sounds is the low rumble of the millstone.

On the first Sunday of every month, the grist mill opens its doors for the Mill Race Market, where patrons can buy local goods and see the process of making stoneground flour. But even on less celebratory days, the millstone turns at the heart of a growing community, producing an industry of local grain that nourishes the culture of farmers, bakers, and foodies around it.

Millers Aaron Grigsby, Charlie Wade, and Ian Gamble brought new life to the mill when Deep Roots Milling moved its operation into the building in 2019, with the goal of making milled grains an accessible part of the local food movement. This access has been a glaring omission, considering grains are the foundation of a traditional diet, and wheat in particular is the most consumed food in the United States.

“Well, it is sort of the staff of life in the Western world and beyond it,” Grigsby points out.

The millers knew that bakers wanted to bake with whole grain to offer regionally, ecologically conscious food.

“We were pretty well aware that there would be a growing market for what we were doing, and that really the bottleneck was that it just wasn’t available,” Grigsby says. But the speed and extent of their growth was a surprise.

Deep Roots has won Good Food Awards for outstanding American craft food the last three years in a row, and the mill’s flour can be tasted in offerings at Belle, Althea Bread, Carpe Donut, Little Hat Creek Farm, MarieBette, Cou Cou Rachou, Albemarle Baking Company, Crustworthy Pizza, Slice Versa, Ambrosia, and Janey’s Bread. It’s also available retail from Stock Provisions, Foods of All Nations, and Greenwood Grocery. At the Ix farmer’s market, you can catch Deep Roots at a stand once a month ahead of the Mill Race Market, or find Tonoloway Farm making silver dollar pancakes with its flour.

As a co-founder of the Common Grain Alliance, Heather Coiner is interested in building the local grain economy as well as exploring it in her Little Hat Creek Farm bakery.

“What I like to do is I like to make familiar things with at least 50 percent stoneground,

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Locally milled grains and flours from Deep Roots Milling at Woodson’s Mill give area bakers a lot to work with. The Mill Race Market offers a closer look at the process on the first Sunday of each month.

“My quickest telltale sign of quality is, do you need a drink with

it?” SCOTT SHANESY, BELLE

local flour,” Coiner says. “So, I make a white sandwich bread, I make a multigrain sourdough, I make rosemary crackers and graham crackers, chocolate chip cookies, and things that are really embedded in our culture.”

Her stock room is filled to the ceiling with sacks of flour. “I use Deep Roots flour in pretty much everything,” she says.

Her Danish rye bread was perfected through a working relationship with the millers, and being able to communicate the grades of flour she was after. There was some back and forth as they honed the ratios of cracked rye and finely ground powder for the mix. “Danish rye has three different grades of rye flour in it, and they have been really generous in working with me to provide those grades of flour that I need,” Coiner says.

Before Scott Shanesy opened the doors at Belle bakery, he knew he wanted to use local, stoneground flour from Deep Roots. “We got in here January 2020, and within the next year we were slowly working the recipes in,” Shanesy says. “Then this past year we made the big switch.”

Deep Roots flour is in their loaves, baguettes, English muffins, bagels, scones, and cookies. “I think everything now besides the donuts, cinnamon rolls, and the brioche,” says Shanesy. But the plan is to transition those items too.

For Shanesy’s hearth loaves with a crackly steamed crust, the process can stretch over three days to finish fermentation, but the rustic, sourdough loaves are the highlight of his bakery.

One of the reasons bakers like Shanesy want stoneground flour is that it has more of the whole grain in it—fiber and minerals from the bran, protein and fat from the germ. Commercial white flour is generally just the starch part of the grain, which makes it less nutritious, harder to digest, and less flavorful.

“My quickest telltale sign of quality is, do you need a drink with it?” Shanesy explains. “Are you salivating a lot? If the textures and aromas and the flavors aren’t right, you’re going to need help. But I’ve found that if the dough is fermented and broken down, and you achieve that right texture, you can just eat a half a loaf and not even think about it.”