The mysteries of white flour and how it becomes the ‘staff of life’

Photo by Cynthia Hochswender
I used to think of white flour as the food equivalent of printer paper: White and bland and not very nutritious.
Two things have given me increased respect for the powdery white stuff.
One is that when bears break into our kitchens, they seem to always end up with white flour on their noses. To me that’s as if a burglar broke into your house and went straight for the white printer paper. It’s perplexing and intriguing and makes me wonder, “Hmmm, what is there about white printer paper that I don’t understand?”
The other is that, like all the rest of you, I started making sourdough starter and bread at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. That wasn’t especially good timing, since of course both bread and starter require flour, and flour was in short supply until about two weeks ago.
Anyway, through a number of stealthy and clever maneuvers I have put together a large supply of King Arthur all-purpose flour, King Arthur bread flour, Maine Grains whole wheat flour and (as of last week) rye flour.
Creating new life
When you bake pastry, flour is just a means to an end: You need flour if you want to have cakes, cookies and pie crust.
When you make sourdough starter and you bake bread, you realize that flour is alive. Or rather (forgive me, I’m not a scientist): Flour used to be alive when it was wheat. It is no longer alive once it’s been milled into flour.
But something magical (Frankenstein’s monster?) occurs when you mix flour with water. The two of them combined entice bacteria to join them from the air and the result is a living, breathing substance called sourdough starter.
It’s important to note that good sourdough starter eats healthy bacteria that’s already in the air in your house (or your favorite bakery). There can also be bad bacteria on your flour, because wheat isn’t heavily cleansed before it is milled. That means it could be tainted with, for example, E. Coli from an animal relieving itself on a wheat stalk. For that reason, unless you’re a bear, you should not eat raw flour.
Wheat flour can, of course, also make anyone sick who is gluten intolerant. There are many other types of alternative flours. There isn’t room enough here to go into detail about all of them. But one thing I do feel confident about, even though I’m not a scientist, is that if you’re only vaguely gluten intolerant, your body will cope better with fresh bread, made either in a bakery or at home, rather than factory-made bread: The slower your flour transitions into bread, the easier it is for your body to absorb the gluten.
So many kinds of flour …
We are going to focus for the purposes of this article on the flours that lend themselves most easily to the creation of sourdough starter and, then, bread.
Last spring, I read multiple articles about people deciding to learn to bake bread during the COVID-19 quarantine. This led almost immediately to a shortage of flour, and also to a shortage of yeast for baking.
That kind of yeast comes in little cubes or packets. It’s a very easy, reliable method for making dough rise. It has been used for centuries all around the world and is especially useful for professional bakers, who need to wake up in the morning and make a set number of loaves that need to be more or less identical.
If you don’t have packaged yeast and if you are OK with your bread production being a little unpredictable, you can make sourdough starter and use it instead of yeast.
The process is very simple: You mix together water and flour and leave them out on the counter and, after a few days, you have starter and all you have to do is feed it daily with more flour and water. When you’re ready, you use it as the base for your bread dough.
It sounded simple, so I decided to try it myself. I figured then I could explain the technique to readers who were not able to find yeast but wanted to make bread.
That was back in about March. It’s now September and while I have managed to make excellent starter and, from it, really good bread, I have learned only one thing about making sourdough starter (and bread): It’s infinitely complicated and there are infinite ways to do it. Or rather, it’s incredibly simple and will work like a charm up until the minute that it stops working, and then you have to figure out another method.
Raising sourdough starter is like raising a child. Many people even animate their starter by giving it a name, or by taking it on vacation or sending it away to sourdough starter summer camp (not kidding).
It’s not necessary to get that wrapped up in your sourdough; and if you find it starting to take over your life, you can tuck it in the refrigerator. Once you do that, it’s like a houseplant and only needs to be fed and watered once a week.
I’m going to send you to the internet to get the instructions on how to make your starter. Again, they’re not complicated but every day is slightly different during the first week, and it would take up too much space here to explain it. I like the technique at Clever Carrot’s website (www.theclevercarrot.com “Beginner sourdough starter”). But there are lots of good methods out there. You can never go wrong with seeking guidance from the King Arthur Flour website, for example.
Helpful tips: What to buy
So I won’t tell you how to make starter from scratch — but I will tell you which supplies I’ve found to be useful.
Everyone who makes sourdough starter has their own things they like and methods they prefer.
But universally, one product that will make your bread-baking life easier is a small food scale. Scales are pretty similar, they all cost about $15 and they all do roughly the same thing. I bought one by Escali recently and it’s a cut above the other brands, in my experience.
Once you begin making starter, you’ll need to store it someplace. I have found that the Ball and Mason jars are too hard to clean; once the sourdough drips on your jar dry and get hard, they turn almost to stone. The Ball and Mason versions have a lot of pattern in their glass and once the sourdough gets into those nooks and crannies you almost need dynamite to get rid of it (or of course a long soak in warm water followed by a cleansing in the dishwasher).
I prefer the Weck jars, which are easy to clean and look nice in the kitchen (Weck 742 Mold Jar, .5 Liter; set of six: $40).
Which flours and why
Most important is your choice of flour and water.
I apologize to the planet and to all of us who are worried about its future but you really need to use a good quality bottled water for this; most tap water has bleach or other chemicals in it.
You also want a flour that doesn’t have bleach in it. Organic flours work well but aren’t essential, in my opinion.
I started out using King Arthur all-purpose flour, which worked great until it stopped working (bakers, by the way, prefer King Arthur because it has more protein than most of the other store brands and protein is very important to your bread and your starter).
My starter pooped out after a few weeks of just eating the all-purpose flour. I did some experiments and eventually found a very good organic whole wheat flour from Maine Grains. I shared some with my friend Anne, who reported that it made her starter go “berserk.”
That eventually pooped out too. Next I used a mix of 50% Maine Grains whole wheat and 50% King Arthur bread flour (which has even more protein than the all-purpose flour). I’m mixing it because I only have about 20 pounds of the Maine Grains, in my freezer, and I’m trying to make it last.
However, over the weekend I fed my starter some rye flour from Arrowhead Mills that I found at the Sharon Farm Market in the shopping plaza. The starter got very excited about the change in diet and got very big and bubbly on the first day, but then it calmed down on the second day.
The proof is in the bread, however, and the loaf I baked with that rye flour starter is especially delicious (photo above).
The bread I’ve been making with the whole wheat/bread flour starter has a definite sour tang to it, even though the dough itself is a mix of King Arthur all-purpose and bread flours.
The bread made with the rye starter just tastes deliciously like homemade bread. No tang.
I prefer it, honestly, to the bread made with the whole wheat-based starter. No doubt this will change over time —because the one constant in bread baking seems to be that nothing is constant.
The case of Jacquier vs. Camardi is expected to continue at Torrington Superior Court the week of Sept. 15.
NORTH CANAAN — A pair of Democratic Town Committee (DTC) candidates are seeking legal recourse to ensure they are included on the ballot this November despite errors on the party endorsement slate.
Plaintiffs Jean Jacquier and Carol Overby brought the case against defendant Marilisa Camardi to Torrington Superior Court, which held an evidentiary hearing Friday, Sept. 12. Testimony from both sides aimed to explain the situation to Judge Ann E. Lynch.
At the July 22 DTC caucus, Jacquier was endorsed as the party’s candidate for town clerk and Overby was endorsed to run for Board of Finance.
The next day, DTC chair and caucus secretary Chris Jacques filed the full endorsement slate and State Election Enforcement Commission (SEEC) documents to Assistant Town Clerk Marilisa Camardi. But the slate was missing information: Jacquier and Overby were not assigned to a specific office or term.
"I am a rookie at this," Jacques said on the witness stand. "I suppose I just didn't look at it closely enough."
Jacquier testified that she was not wearing her glasses while filling out her information on the official endorsement slate and “made a clerical mistake.”
Overby was not called as a witness.
Camardi testified to noticing on July 24 that the form was missing information and, after cross referencing the accompanying SEEC documents, filled in the blanks herself. It was established during the hearing that making clerical corrections on forms is within proper protocol for a town clerk.
On Aug. 7, however, First Selectman Brian Ohler alerted the Secretary of the State’s (SOTS) office that the original document was incomplete. (Ohler was not present at the Sept. 12 hearing.)
SOTS Election Officer Heather Augeri reviewed the slate as it was originally submitted. Per the filing, she responded that the endorsements were not properly certified and therefore void. Augeri advised Camardi remove both nominees from the ballot.
Jacquier testified that since the Aug. 7 correspondence she has had several phone calls with Augeri, who she described as a friend. Jacquier said Augeri relayed the same message to her: “She said it’s not valid.”
Camardi is the acting town clerk in North Canaan, though she is technically Jacquier’s part-time assistant. Jacquier is the current, four-term elected town clerk but has not reported to work since February following a dispute between her and the first selectman. “I did not resign. I did not quit. I just left,” Jacquier testified. “I couldn’t stand the turmoil.”
Plaintiff attorney John Kennelly said the SOTS office has no statutory authority to rule on issues relating to municipal party endorsements. Kennelly claimed that as the acting town clerk, Camardi is the sole individual responsible for finalizing and certifying the town election ballot.
Kennelly asserted that if Camardi was informed through the SEEC documents of which offices Jacquier and Overby were endorsed for, then Augeri’s advice should be ignored and the two candidates should be eligible to run in November.
Camardi said she was waiting to finalize the ballot until the court makes its decision.
After nearly three hours of testimony, Judge Lynch referenced a similar case, Airey vs. Feliciano (2024), in which Connecticut Supreme Court ruled to reject an improperly signed petition sheet. Lynch requested briefs from each attorney by Monday, Sept. 15, and planned to continue the hearing that week.
Aradev LLC’s plans to redevelop Wake Robin Inn include four 2,000-square-foot cabins, an event space, a sit-down restaurant and fast-casual counter, a spa, library, lounge, gym and seasonal pool. If approved, guest room numbers would increase from 38 to 57.
LAKEVILLE — The public hearing for the redevelopment of Wake Robin Inn is over. Salisbury Planning and Zoning Commission now has two months to make a decision.
The hearing closed on Tuesday, Sept. 9, after its seventh session.
Michael Klemens, chair of P&Z, had warned at the opening of the proceedings that “this might be a long night” due to a last-minute influx of material from experts hired by Wells Hill Road residents William and Angela Cruger to oppose the project, but this turned out not to be the case.
These 11th hour submissions set a sour tone to the start of the meeting, with commissioner Robert Riva stating that it was “not very professional to pull this stunt on this Commission.” Riva said he had diligently reviewed the already substantial documentation provided by both the applicant and the opposing experts, and was surprised to find a “dump” of additional information submitted just hours before the meeting’s start time at 6 p.m.
Tensions were quickly eased, however, when William Cruger offered his concise summation of his platform’s opposition to the expansion, which is the second iteration of the project after an earlier version was withdrawn late last year.
“It’s important for you all to hear from me that there was never any disrespect intended to the Commission, the commissioners, and to the process,” Cruger said. He defended the last-minute submissions as an effort on the part of the experts to be thorough in their analysis: “Our intention… has been and remains to do our best to get whatever we think will be helpful in your deliberations into the record.”
The Crugers formally entered the hearing process as intervenors for the first application from Aradev LLC, the applicant, in the fall of 2024, meaning they and their hired consultants had full party status in the hearing proceedings. During this cycle, however, they chose not to petition for intervenor status, yet during this round of hearings their role has been similar. Klemens described them as having “almost intervenor status — not quite.”
William Cruger summarized the consultant’s findings for Aradev’s revised application, noting they found it to be “virtually identical in scale to the previous proposal.”
“Our position is that the proposed expansion would absolutely negatively impact the usefulness, enjoyment and value of the surrounding properties,” he said.
Aradev’s attorney Joshua Mackey countered by saying that the special permit conditions would elevate the currently non-conforming hotel in the zone, describing it as a “community asset that is improved, regulated, and safeguarded for generations to come.” He characterized Aradev as “the next steward of this storied property.”
After Mackey and Aradev co-founder Steven Cohen concluded their remarks, Klemens closed the hearing with no public comment, which he had stated would be the case at last week’s hearing session on Thursday, Sept. 4. Klemens said that P&Z will begin deliberating the proposal in early October after the commissioners have had the chance to review the information in the record.
A total of 45 letters, including the Crugers’ experts’ testimony, were submitted since the Sept. 4 meeting alone, alongside hundreds of pages of application materials and additional testimony.
As the Commission deliberates and reviews, all of this information is available for public viewing on the “Meeting Documents” subpage under P&Z’s section on the town website, www.salisburyct.us.
The Commission must issue a decision on the application by Nov. 13, the end of the statutorily defined deliberation window.
COPAKE — Judith Marie “Judy” Drury, 76, a four-year resident of Copake, New York, formerly of Millerton, New York, died peacefully on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025, at Vassar Bros. Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, surrounded by her loving family and her Lord and savior Jesus Christ. Judy worked as a therapy aide for Taconic DDSO in Wassaic, New York, prior to her retirement on Feb. 1, 2004. She then went on to work in the Housekeeping Department at Vassar Bros. Medical Center for several years.
Born Jan. 2, 1949, in Richford, Vermont, she was the daughter of the late Leo J. and Marie A. (Bean) Martel. She attended Roeliff Jansen Central School in Columbia County, New York, in her early years. Judy was an avid sports fan and she was particularly fond of the New England Patriots football team and the New York Rangers hockey team. She enjoyed spending time with her family and traveling to Florida, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania for many years. She was a longtime parishioner of Faith Bible Chapel of Shekomeko on Silver Mountain in Millerton as well.
Judy is survived by two brothers; John Martel and his wife, Jane of Falls Village, Connecticut, and Frank Martel of Ancram, New York; her sister, Susanna “Sue” Martel of Copake, New York; and three generation of nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews and great-great nieces and nephews. In addition to her parents, Judy was predeceased by her brother, Leo W. Martel, Sr. of Poughkeepsie, New York, and her sister, Helen J. Slater of Hillsdale, New York; her sister-in-law, Karen Martel of Ancram and a special nephew, Jacob Stickle of Copake.
A visiting hour will take place on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. at Faith Bible Chapel, 222 Silver Mountain Road, Millerton, New York 12546. A funeral service will be held at 3 p.m. Pastor William Mayhew will officiate. Burial will follow at Irondale Cemetery in Millerton, New York. A celebration of Judy’s life will be announced at a later date. Arrangements have been entrusted to the Scott D. Conklin Funeral Home, 37 Park Avenue, Millerton, New York 12546.
Memorial contributions may be made to Faith Bible Chapel, 222 Silver Mountain Road, Millerton, New York 12546 or American Cancer Society, 45 Reade Place, Poughkeepsie, New York 12601. To send an online condolence to the family, flowers to the service or to plant a tree in Judy’s memory, please visit www.conklinfuneralhome.com
AMESVILLE — Jeremy Dakin, 78, passed away Aug. 31, 2025, at Vassar Brothers Medical Center after a long battle with COPD and other ailments.
Jeremy was a dear friend to many, and a fixture of the Amesville community. There will be a service in his memory at Trinity Lime Rock Episcopal Church on Sept. 27 at 11 a.m.
Below is the obituary Jeremy himself wrote:
Born July 20, 1947, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
A resident of Salisbury, Connecticut for over 75 years, he graduated from UVM in 1970, at which time he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a German translator (“It just seemed like a better idea than learning Vietnamese”), and served two years in West Berlin.
Returning to Vermont in 1973 he began a 16-year gig as a ski shop manager and a professional ski patroller, which led to a 30-year stint as an EMT.
A direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse (who was hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692), he is survived by a nephew, Robin Dakin, of Englewood, Ohio, his wife Amy, and a flock of grandnieces, all of whom seem to have inherited the family love of camping and canoeing.
The love of his life, Wren Smith, passed away in 2007 after a 10-year battle with breast cancer. By the time he was seventy, Jeremy’s physical activities were curtailed by COPD, due to a lifetime of smoking.
Rather than spend money on flowers, please consider a donation to the American Cancer Society and/or the American Lung Association. But, for Pete’s sake, don’t smoke.