As All Aboard Wheat Harvest cuts into its 14th year, High Plains Journal is celebrating wheat’s journey from the early summer soils of the High Plains to our readers’ tables year-round.
This week, we welcome our 2022 AAWH correspondents: Stephanie Cronje, Brian Jones, Laura Haffner, Christy Paplow, and Janel Schemper, as they bring wheat harvest to our doorsteps. They’ll share with us all the trials and the victories they encounter along the way.
Small victories are already taking place for many of them as they are loading campers, making plans and, for some, awaiting the arrival of a new combine for this harvest run.
Whether the equipment is new or old, it will all be heading south as the wheat fields will be turning gold within the next few weeks.
Off the field and to the mill
The coming weeks will determine the crop’s quality and yield, something that the Stafford County Flour Mills, home of Hudson Cream flour in Hudson, Kansas, takes very seriously.
By focusing on milling and baking quality, SCFM has been providing premium flour since 1904, when it started out as Hudson Milling Company.
At harvest, truckloads of wheat arrive at the mill and are immediately checked by an infrared analyzer for moisture content.
“We check every load for what its characteristics are, and we keep the wheat that fits our specs and ship the wheat that’s not,” Reule Foote, president of SCFM, said.
Those characteristics include 12% protein and a specific milling quality to the kernel itself.
“We want to extract 72% or better,” Foote said.
SCFM sources its wheat from three local elevators located in the towns of Hudson, Macksville and Sylvia—all three are 23 miles from each other. Foote said they have been able to source 90% of their wheat from those three for the last several years. Any additional wheat they’ve needed comes from the western part of the state as it is more cost effective to bring wheat in that is already headed east to the port for shipping.
SCFM currently mills 8,800 bushels of wheat a day and uses up to 1.5 million bushels a year. That is an impressive number in its own right but even more so when you consider the mill’s 1905 capacity of 75 barrels a day, according to SCFM’s website hudsoncream.com.
After harvest the wheat is tested in SCFM’s onsite lab and also sent to an independent lab to test its baking and milling qualities. All of this is done to make sure the biscuits, pies and cakes of SCFM’s loyal customers turn out as expected every time.
A bumper crop of baking
She may not be a Hudson Cream flour user, but Sue Little, owner and operator of Ozzie Bakes in Coldwater, Kansas, knows good flour when she bakes with it.
The Adelaide, South Australia, native has been baking and cooking since she was old enough to stand on the stool in her mother’s kitchen.
“My mother was a very good baker and cake maker,” Little said.
Her mother taught Little the importance of from-scratch baking, keeping Little on her toes even as a busy young mother.
“[My mother] came in my house one day. I didn’t know, she’d just dropped by and there was a packet of cake mix and she said, ‘What’s that?’”
Little explained that she had picked the mix up to make her young daughter’s birthday treats at school. After her mother dropped the cake mix in the trash she took Little to her pantry to drive her point home.
“‘There’s flour. There’s sugar. You’ve got eggs. You’ve got butter. Make it from scratch, Sue. It’ll taste better than any of the others,’” Little said, recounting the story.
Little’s from-scratch cooking and baking includes her Australian meat pies with beef or chook—another word for chicken—croissants, donuts, a variety of quick breads, brownies and muffins. These are all very dependent on the quality of flour.
“I have used some cheap, nasty flours in my past and I’ve noticed it wasn’t that great, so I do think it’s important to have good flour,” she said.
Those cheap flours can make a pie crust as dry as a saltine cracker and bread that doesn’t rise to its fullest potential.
While Little finds baking from scratch therapeutic, she will admit there are times she wonders what she’s doing.
“It’s a rarity now to find anyone that runs a business and does from scratch too,” she said. “I just really love baking. It’s hard work, but I love it.”
Jennifer Theurer can be reached at 620-227-1858 or [email protected].
