How Small Scale Millers Like Nan Kohler Are Changing Our Flour

Bake From Scratch

I first met Nan Kohler at a grain conference. In a room packed with wheat breeders, grass seed farmers, and bakers, Nan introduced herself as a miller. Not a baker who occasionally tried making flour, or a grass seed farmer who needed to figure out how to get their product to market, but a miller, plain and simple.

She told me about Grist & Toll, a small milling operation that she’d opened in 2012 in Los Angeles. I’d never thought about how flour is made or the technicalities of turning a seed into the stuff I bake with. I knew immediately that I wanted to visit Nan at her mill.

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Spaghetti Vigil

Communal Table

Kim and I met in 1988. That was definitely the year because we were sitting in the backseat of Joie’s VW Rabbit, the three of us sounding the cry of what I am is what I am by Edie Brickell at top decibel. The windows were wide open, and the smell of gardenias and pungent Spanish moss drifted in as we ambled through the old Florida neighborhood.

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Fissures

Brain, Child Magazine

The Columbia River Gorge opened up before us. We were in a car—his car—driving 70 miles an hour through the rough-hewn Columbia River Valley surrounded by massive rock formations that took as long as 17 million years to form. We’d last seen each other the week before, just two families meeting for pizza.

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