The last weeks have been an expansion of my sourcing of wheat berries, this time to the heartland of America with some Heirloom Turkey Red from Breadtopia. I had not heard of Turkey Red until  a couple weeks ago when I came across an article on Sunrise Flour Mills that spoke highly of the grain for making a nice bread flour. This wheat, introduced to the Great Plains by Mennonites from Russia/Crimea around 1870, used to be widely grown in the Midwest, but fell out of favor after new engineered modern varietals took hold of the wheat industry and public tastes. If you are bored, you should read this article, Turkey Wheat: The Cornerstone of an Empire (a little dramatic of a title though).

These particular Turkey Red berries come from Heartland Mills, although there is no more information about the particular farm. I have my first bread experiment with Turkey Red flour in progress, but thought I would share this short video (my first) of the milling.

For this fairly hard grain, I set the mill at a slightly roughly setting resulting in a fine light meal texture that looked perfect for a long fermented rustic loaf.

The video cuts out a little at the end. my wife is constantly running out of memory on her phone due to an insane number of baby photos and videos being texted on any given day. I was just about to explain that the sifter is #50 mesh and does a great job of producing a fine flour with more extracted bran than my previous sifter.

Here is a gratuitous photo of baby playing with bags of grain. A future miller maybe.