Sprouted News | Summers Sprouted Flour Co.

Enjoy our sprouted flours!		Spring 2008
Summers Sprouted Flour Co. P.O.Box 337 Torreon, NM 87061 877-384-0337 foodproducts@creatingheaven.net

To Your Health
Sprouted Grain Breads

Elimination of 2# Bags

Price Increases

Mill Tour

New store locations on hold

Since we are eliminating 2# bags from our product line, we have temporarily blocked the 'flour location system' until we have contacted all store owners to see if they are going to switch to repacking flour for their customers or open a bulk bin.

We will re-institute this section as we hear from our store accounts.

To Your Health Sprouted Grain Breads

I have been baking bread for many years, but sprouted breads for only three years. I've always loved baking and cooking. As an artist, my canvas is the dinner table, and my medium is healthful foods.

About ten years ago I realized that I needed to make some changes in my life, centering on my body: how I treated it and what I put or didn't put into it. I developed a passion for hacking through the jungle of 'nutrition' information available to discover the truth concerning the proper relationship to food and proper preparations of foods for the maximum benefit to our bodies. The more complicated my research, the more simple and clear the answer came: Eat a variety of all foods God made available to us in as pure form as possible. This led to more research encompassing the preparation of foods before industrialization; during the times when cancer and heart disease were rarities at best.

Armed with this wonderful information, I began counseling friends and groups of folks who wanted to make positive lifestyle changes as well. When we talked about how our ancestors would harvest grain and leave it in the fields for several days to germinate (sprout) before threshing and storing it, and about a simple (but time-consuming) way to modern-day germinate or sprout grains for baking, the answer was always, "I don't have the time nor the inclination to do that, can't you just do it for me?" And so I did. And that's how To Your Health Sprouted Grain Breads came to be.

Starting in my kitchen three years ago baking for a few friends, word quickly spread and opportunities arose to bake for customers of several local and regional CSA's and co-ops. I outgrew my kitchen space and wanted to get my product in several additional markets, so I opened up a commercial kitchen in our barn in September of 2006 and got licensed as a food processor. My business is still limited to CSA's, co-ops, a couple of retail stores and restaurants, internet orders, and regional farmers' markets, but being small ensures the quality of my product and it's still just me and a couple of employees sprouting, milling, and baking fresh to order.

All of my breads are organic, using only fresh organic and natural ingredients. I use local sources when I can like local pecans from unsprayed trees, and I grow herbs organically. I buy organic grains from a small organic farm in Iowa and do all the sprouting, drying, milling and baking myself. I do not use soy, preservatives, or yeast in my breads. They are leavened by fermentation. It takes 48 hours to produce a loaf of bread from flour to loaf, and it takes a week, from grain to loaf.

During the spring and summer months my ovens stay very busy baking up to 200 loaves, 60 bags of crackers, and hundreds of muffins in a week, and during the fall and winter, I get to slow down a bit. Besides eight different loaves of bread, I also bake organic sprouted brownies, crackers, biscuits, muffins, granola, and trail mix.

Every opportunity I get to go into my kitchen and bake is pure joy for me. Even after several years of baking, I still get excited every time I make another bread. My personal favorites are the Apricot Almond and Lemon Poppyseed loaves, the crackers for snacking, and the decadence of the brownies. Knowing how good sprouted bread is for you, I hope I never lose the passion for making it for all those folks who enjoy it.

While it's just me in my kitchen, it would not have been possible without my sweet, supportive husband Jeff who built it for me and encourages me as my little business grows. And, of course, he loves to eat my breads, especially with raw butter and honey.

          Peggy Sutton
          Owner
          To Your Health Sprouted Grain Breads

Elimination of 2# Bags

Several economic situations (gas prices, paper-cost increases and grain costs) are forcing us to eliminate our sales of 2# bags of all our sprouted flour products. Right now, we make only a few cents on each 2# bag and without making a major price increase to cover these costs (and pricing ourselves right out of the market) we would literally be selling the bags at a loss.

We have run out of 2# bags and would hope that for those of you only selling 2# bags (especially for our store accounts and coop buyers), you would shift your orders to bulk buying, to repack for your customers, place the flour in a bulk bin or to special order 10#, 12# or 25# bags for your customers.

We realize that this change may mean some of our stores may no longer carry our products. We want those customers to know that they may be able to special order from these sources or direct-buy larger amounts from us.

Price Increases

As the world around us continues to go a little crazy (we think with major changes that have to happen), we have been hit with staggering cost increases. We hope that the price increases we have made will carry us through for awhile... but every grain order since the beginning of the year have had increases. We hope this levels off soon.

Grinder Stone Repairs


Before Photo. Big Bertha (the stone grinder) before being dismantled.	Dismantling. Getting ready to open.	The Stones Exposed. The first time I saw these beautiful rose pink granite stones, my heart leaped. The stones add one more link into making this flour so special!

Scoring the Stone. Eight hours of hard work, roughing and scoring the two 24-inch stones.	Checking the Dressing. The stones are painted with an edible paint and the grinder is put back together. The stones are then ground together to take off any high points. Then the whole scoring process is repeated.	Back Together. Once the stones are perfectly ground, we run plain grain through the machine to remove any traces of paint. Hank also did a number of modifications to make cleaning the inside of the grinder possible.

Mill Tour


The Grain Washers - the first step in getting the grain clean is to wash 100 lbs with water, then hydrogen peroxide, and rinse again.	The grain goes into the kitchen were it is washed again and sorted through to remove the odd wild seed, hull or rock! Then it goes into the sprouting buckets with water.	The sprouting grain goes in the Sprouting Room where the temperature is held around 70.

The sprouted grain is run through the kitchen again, where it is spread on the drying trays and rinsed with hot water before it goes into the dehydrator.	Dehydrator - The racks of sprouted grain go into the dehydrator for 48 hours at 110 degrees.	Big Bertha (our stone-grinder) will grind 300 lbs of flour in an hour. The flour for the 10#, 25# & 50# bags is ground right into the bags.

Little Max (the grist mill) does our cereal grinding.	Packing Area - The 2# bags are filled, weighed and glued at the packing table, and the larger bags are brought from the Grinding Room to be glued here.	Shipping Area - Packaged flour is placed here, along with the box storage. Your order is packed up here.

Inside the Mill	The Office	The Workroom

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