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.
SHARON — Sharon Dennis Rosen, 83, died on Aug. 8, 2025, in New York City.
Born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut, she grew up on her parents’ farm and attended Sharon Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. She went on to study at Skidmore College before moving to New York City, where she married Dr. Harvey Rosen and together they raised two children.
Sharon’s lifelong love of learning and the arts shaped both her work and her passions. For decades, she served as a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and the Asia Society, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with countless visitors. She also delighted in traveling widely, immersing herself in other cultures, and especially treasured time spent visiting her daughter and grandsons in Europe and Africa.
She was also deeply connected to her hometown, where in retirement she spent half her time and had many friends. She served as President of the Sharon East Side Cemetery until the time of her death, where generations of her family are buried and where she will also be laid to rest.
She is survived by her husband, Harvey; her children, Jennifer and Marc; and four beloved grandchildren.
Claire and Garland Jeffreys in the film “The King of In Between.”
There is a scene in “The King of In Between,” a documentary about musician Garland Jeffreys, that shows his name as the answer to a question on the TV show “Jeopardy!”
“This moment was the film in a nutshell,” said Claire Jeffreys, the film’s producer and director, and Garland’s wife of 40 years. “Nobody knows the answer,” she continued. “So, you’re cool enough to be a Jeopardy question, but you’re still obscure enough that not one of the contestants even had a glimmer of the answer.”
Garland Jeffreys never quite became a household name, but he carved out a singular place in American music by refusing to fit neatly into any category. A biracial New Yorker blending rock, reggae, soul and R&B, he used genre fusion as a kind of rebellion — against industry pigeonholes, racial boundaries and the musical status quo. Albums like “Ghost Writer” (1977) captured the tension of a post–civil rights America, while songs like “Wild in the Streets” made him an underground prophet of urban unrest. He moved alongside artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen but always in his own lane — part poet, part agitator, part bridge between cultures.
“I think what I tried to do with the film, wittingly or unwittingly, was just to show that we all have these lives and they don’t often meet our dreams of what we think we’re entitled to, we’re talented enough to get or whatever,” said Claire. “We all have these goals, but we’re sort of stymied. Often, it’s partly circumstance and luck, but it’s also very often something that we’re doing or not doing that’s impeding us.”
This is not the typical rock-and-roll redemption story. There are no smashed guitars, no heroic overdoses, no dramatic comeback tour. What we get instead is something quieter and more intimate: hours of archival footage that Claire spent years sorting through. The sheer effort behind the film is palpable — so much so that, as she admitted with a laugh, it cured her of any future ambitions in filmmaking.
“What I learned with this project was A, I’m never doing it again. It was just so hard. And B, you know, you can do anything if you collaborate with people that know what they’re doing.”
Claire worked with the editing team of Evan M. Johnson and Ben Sozanski and a slew of talented producers, and ended up with a truthful portrayal — a beautiful living document for Garland’s legions of fans and, perhaps most importantly, for the couple’s daughter, Savannah.
“She’s been in the audience with me maybe three or four times,” said Claire. “The last time, I could tell that she was beginning to feel very proud of the effort that went into it and also of being a part of it.”
Savannah pursued a career in music for a while herself but has changed tracks and become a video producer.
“I think she couldn’t quite see music happening for herself,” said Claire. “She was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to struggle the way I saw my dad struggling and I’m going to get a job with a salary.’”
The film doesn’t just track the arc of an underappreciated musician, however. The music, always playing, is the soundtrack of a life — of a man navigating racial, musical and personal boundaries while balancing marriage, parenthood, aging, addiction andrecovery. Garland and Claire speak plainly about getting sober in the film, a life choice that gave them both clarity and shows Claire as a co-conspirator in his survival.
“I did some work early on with a director,” said Claire. “He wanted the final cut, and I didn’t feel like I could do that — not because I wanted so much to control the story, but I didn’t want the story to be about Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosed in 2017, Garland, now 81, is in the late stages of the disease. Claire serves as his primary caregiver. The film quietly acknowledges his diagnosis, but it doesn’t dwell — a restraint that feels intentional. Garland spent a career refusing to be reduced: not to one sound, one race or one scene. And so the documentary grants him that same dignity in aging. His memory may be slipping, but the film resists easy sentimentality. Instead, it shows what remains — his humor, his voice, his marriage, the echo of a life lived on the edges of fame and at the center of his own convictions.
The Moviehouse in Millerton will be screening “The King of In Between” on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. Peter Aaron, arts editor of Chronogram Magazine will conduct a talkback and Q&A with Claire Jeffreys after the film. Purchase tickets at themoviehouse.net.
The Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Hub, brings renowned writers and thinkers to Norfolk for conversation. Celebrating its fifth season this fall, the festival will gather 18 writers for discussions at the Norfolk Library on Sept. 20 and Oct. 3 through 5.
Jerome A. Cohen, author of the memoir “Eastward, Westward: A Lifein Law.”Haystack Book Festival
For example, “Never Take the Rule of Law for Granted: China and the Dissident,” will be held Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. at the Norfolk Library. It brings together Jerome A. Cohen, author of “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law,” and Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong King’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic” in dialogue with journalist Richard Hornik to discuss the rule of law and China.
The Council on Foreign Relations stated, “Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. He established the study of Chinese law in the United States. An advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for sixty years.”
Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, revealed his long view on China: “We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever.’ There will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”
Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Haystack Book Festival
In “The Troublemaker,” Clifford chronicles Lai’s life from child refugee to pro-democracy billionaire to his current imprisonment by the Chinese Communist Party. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He was the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Standard (Hong Kong and Seoul).
Journalist Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.Haystack Book Festival
Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center, will moderate the discussion. Hornik is the former executive editor of AsiaWeek, news service director of Time magazine, and former Time bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Betsy Lerner, author of “Shred Sisters,” is giving the 2025 Brendan Gill lecture at the Haystack Book Festival.Haystack Book Festival
The Brendan Gill Lecture is a highlight of the festival honoring longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill, who died in1997. Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for fifty years. Betsy Lerner, New York Times-recognized author of “Shred Sisters,” will deliver this year’s lecture on Friday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Norfolk Library.
Visit haystackbookfestival.org to register. Admission is free.