We grind every gram of flour we use. The mill sits behind the oven, runs every morning before the sun is up, and produces fresh stone-ground whole-wheat, rye, spelt, einkorn, and emmer.

Why bother? Two reasons. First, flour goes stale much faster than people realize. The oils in the bran oxidize within days of milling, dulling the flavour and weakening the nutritional profile. By the time commodity flour reaches a bakery, it's typically been sitting for months. Fresh-milled flour smells like a meadow; aged flour smells like… flour.

Second, milling lets us work directly with the farmers who grow our grains. We buy from three farms in southern Ontario, all of them growing heritage varieties — Red Fife, Marquis, Acadia — that you simply cannot find pre-milled at any commercial supplier. These wheats have flavour. Real flavour. They make bread that tastes like wheat tasted a hundred years ago.

It's slower. It's more expensive. The mill needs maintenance, the grains take more space to store, and we deal with seasonal variation in protein content. But the bread is better, and the bread is the whole point.