S8 Ep 34: Flour Power: Preserving the Flavor of Tradition to Nourish Local Communities with Jennifer Lapidus
“The flavor and the taste of our regions, as soon as you start industrializing it… it strips the flavor of the grain. It might be good as a crop that will bring in money, but it's not going to have that same soulful value that the type of flour that is stone-milled.” —Jennifer Lapidus
From the farmers who nurture the grains, to the millers who coax out their complex flavors, to the bakers who transform these flours into loaves that nourish the soul, these artisans play a crucial role in preserving the unique tastes of their regions.
Jennifer Lapidus founded Carolina Ground, a small flour mill that aims to revive traditional milling practices and strengthen the connection between farmers, millers, and bakers. With a passion for history and a deep appreciation for the art of sourdough bread-making, Jennifer has spent over 30 years championing the use of locally sourced, stone-milled flour to create exceptional baked goods that nourish both body and soul.
Join the conversation as Justine and Jennifer talk about the importance of following your passions even if the path is not straightforward, how collaboration and support help the baking community thrive, the power of preserving tradition in the age of rapid industrialization, the benefits of focusing on the quality over quantity, and the value of finding the right balance for a mission-driven business.
Connect with Shizu:
Jennifer (she/her) is a baker, a miller, an author, a wife, a mother and stepmom, a sister, a fan of beagle mutts, bitter foods, long walks, and Belgian road bikes. She’s forklift certified and her favorite musical is A Chorus Line (though Hamilton is a close second).
Episode Highlights:
00:40 Baking as a Mark in History
05:21 Making Sourdough More Nutritious and Flavorful
09:16 The Farmers-Millers-Bakers Community
13:16 The Benefits of Growing Laterally
16:39 More than Just Sugar and Egg
Resources:
Book
Tweets:
Real bread made with care and patience is a profound expression of the earth's bounty. Join the conversation as @jreichman and Carolina Ground Founder, Jennifer Lapidus talk about talk about the journey of reviving traditional milling practices and the collaborative spirit fueling the artisanal baking movement. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season8 #SourdoughRevival #TraditionalMilling #ArtisanalBaking #FarmersMillersBakers #FlavoroftheLand #CollaborativeCommunity #SustainableProduction
Inspirational Quotes:
03:01 “I saw bread baking as a way back as a mark in history. This was one activity that still exists and that had existed so many years before.” —Jennifer Lapidus
05:56 “This was not a bread that I had to convince people to eat. It was a unique product.” —Jennifer Lapidus
07:05 “Whole grain baking was mired in this world of health food, and it was stuck in this idea that whole wheat meant cardboard, bitter, and flat.” —Jennifer Lapidus
09:41 “Bakers love bakers. We get along really well. It's a very collaborative, generous community.” —Jennifer Lapidus
14:05 “I want the experience to be something that drives quality of life, not just driven by numbers.” —Jennifer Lapidus
16:14 “It's so much more fun, it's so much more powerful, it's so much more impactful when we can do it together.” —Justine Reichman
18:29 “The flavor and the taste of our regions, as soon as you start industrializing it… it strips the flavor of the grain. It might be good as a crop that will bring in money, but it's not going to have that same soulful value that the type of flour that is stone-milled.” —Jennifer Lapidus
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: So good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Jennifer Lapidus. She's the founder of Carolina Ground.
Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to meet you, learn more about Carolina Ground. We just kicked it off finding out how our worlds have intertwined up until now, so let's start the conversation so our guests get to learn more about you and what you're up to.
Jennifer Lapidus: Super well. Thank you for having me.
Justine Reichman: My pleasure. My pleasure. For those not familiar with you and Carolina Ground, tell us a little bit about what Carolina Ground is.
Jennifer Lapidus: Yes, yes. Carolina Ground is a small flour mill. Flour, as in bakers. We launched to connect the farmer, miller and baker here in the south. So basically, we buy grain from large scale organic growers here in the Carolina or surrounding southern states. But predominantly in North Carolina. We stone grind the flour so it's a really high quality flour, and we do both whole grain and sift it, and we sell it to bakeries throughout the Southeast. And we sell the flour also to home bakers nationwide through our online store.
Justine Reichman: In your background, what was it that drew you to where you are today? Was it something in your background? Was it an interest? Was it a passion? Can you give us a little bit of a synopsis? Your 32nd pitch into how you got to where you are today.
Jennifer Lapidus: I started baking when I was in college. I was a history major, and I was really taken by the moment in history. The Industrial Revolution, the reaction to what was happening. It was a time in history where I felt like there was this polarity. There was the reaction from artists and writers to what was happening in this change in society. And I was really intrigued by it. It really drew me to an interest in doing something tactile to learning how to bake bread. I wanted to learn how to garden. I just was pushed in a direction by something I learned as a history major. I grew up in Miami, which was very disconnected during the era that I grew up. It was very disconnected from these tactile activities although my mom had a beard on bread. So I started baking, just as a secondary activity while I was making, writing papers for school, and I was fascinated by the process.
Justine Reichman: And so you graduated from college. You had been doing this while you were there because you were inspired. That's what college was supposed to do, right? Inspire us. It seems like you're on the right track. And why did you build this business? Why did you get into bread in particular? What were you hopeful for achieving?
“I saw bread baking as a way back as a mark in history. This was one activity that still exists and that had existed so many years before.” —Jennifer Lapidus
Jennifer Lapidus: There was this thing for me when I was baking. I saw bread baking as a way back as a mark in history. That this was one activity that still exists, that had existed so many years before. I was very intrigued by the fact that my leavening of these yeast packets said rapid rise like what came before. It was obviously a reaction to something else. And so I started digging, and I found my way. I actually did. This was in the very early 90's. I learned about natural leavening, or sourdough. This particular style of baking is Flemish . I was really intrigued by this bread so I secured a couple apprenticeships. But for me, what drew me in a lot was feeling like this was a food that doesn't exist in our food scape right now. This is bread that they were referring to when they said bread of life, like this is real bread. And it was incredible to me that just flour, water and salt. We were stone grinding our flour, baking it in a wood fired oven. It was just this epitome of authenticity and flavor. I was raised in Miami, so far from the materialistic. The culture that I grew up in, although my parents were very down to earth. I mean, Miami Vice was like it was the 80's. I watched from the 70's to the 80's. Our population balloon. Miami is like the Wild West. There's nowhere else like it. And it sort of exaggerates everything in that moment of materialism. And yeah. So anyways, that was kind of part of it. I want to bring back this element of history and make this bread available.
Justine Reichman: Let's go back a minute. You did this out of college. Is that correct? Because you had started in college apprenticeships, and then you kicked off your own business. So that's your first time being an entrepreneur. And so what was that experience like for you? Because in college, you did these on apprenticeships, but it wasn't like you'd worked in business before, or you had built a business so that's got to be a little scary and with lots of unknowns.
Jennifer Lapidus: Well, baking is very methodical. There were certain things that kept me very tethered. I sort of mirrored the schedules that I had been experiencing in these businesses that I was working in, my two apprenticeships. But along the way, I had gotten married, had a baby, gotten a divorce, all of these things happened within those first few years. And through all of that, the bakery was like the one very clear. The culture needed to be fed, the flour needed to be milled, the oven needed to be fired. And this was not a bread that I had to convince people to eat. It was a unique product.
Justine Reichman: Talk to me about that. Tell me, how is it unique? If I was to taste yours and taste another one. What would the experience be like for me?
“Whole grain baking was mired in this world of health food, and it was stuck in this idea that whole wheat meant cardboard, bitter, and flat.” —Jennifer Lapidus
Jennifer Lapidus: It's so exciting. Everyone knows what sourdough is now. Back then, sourdough was San Francisco sourdough, or Alaskan style. It really just denoted, this sourness that was a microbial that was also, the bread itself was leavened with a pinch of yeast, but this was like natural leavening. That was a different process, and the flavor profile was not driven by sour. It was more of a balance. But when you're working with grain in this way, it's a way more nutritious product. I could talk to somebody about, this is the quality of pre fermentation, or this is the health benefits of, or they could just taste it because it has a much greater depth of flavor, complexity and mouth feel. But also, to me, I was really determined to produce bread. I felt like whole grain baking was just sort of mired in this world of healthy food, and it was really stuck in this idea that whole wheat meant cardboard, bitter and flat.
Justine Reichman: So this has been a long journey for you. I feel like it was part of that moment that you had in college, and that it led you to where you are. You now have this bakery, and it seemed like it was as methodical to create the bread as it was to build the business for you, which I think is amazing because it's not like that for everyone. Sometimes, it's like you're trying to figure it all out. But for you, it seemed like it was really methodical, and it just made sense. So would that be a fair statement?
Jennifer Lapidus: It is a fair statement. Eventually, I found myself as a single mom. And it's interesting because it was like the perfect thing to do as a single mom. The bakery was next to my house. It had a certain rhythm that parenting has as well. So it was this really lovely balance in a way. It's the best day. It was this balance between raising my daughter and my bakery. I would say raising my bakery, because there weren't really other examples. There's very few of us in the country at that time doing these sort of cottage bakeries. Back then, it was a wood fired oven. These days, people use these ovens. People have gotten into the design of these sort of cottage bakery ovens. Rofco is one brand. But back then, it was the wood fired oven. But regardless, as a mother of a 29 year old now I can say, yeah, I really was lucky. Because even though I was on the path to law school, and I threw that aside when I ran down this passionate pathway of reviving an art form as I felt like I was this active, this like activist that I was like doing this service.
Justine Reichman: 25, 30 years later, you have this and you create this bread, how do you see it as compared to others that are now in space? Because it's a bit more of a saturated space. There's a lot more going on in it versus when you really kicked it off initially.
“Bakers love bakers. We get along really well. It's a very collaborative, generous community.” —Jennifer Lapidus
Jennifer Lapidus: I'm not. I'm no longer running a bakery. I now run a flour mill, which is really interesting. Because when I was running a bakery, I watched the baking space sphere. Bakeries came online as I was. I eventually moved my bakery to watch North Carolina. I started in Tennessee. And by the early 2000's, you could really see the artisan baking movement taking off, which was so exciting. I love bakers. We get along really well. It's a very collaborative, generous community, which is really what enabled Carolina Ground to get launched. Because by 2008, we were a very cohesive community, and we all experienced this crisis together. So we pulled our chairs together. We're like, hey, is this possible? Because I had this idea, and I was amazed that everyone followed my lead because I was definitely the most fringe baker. I was doing it the hardest you possibly could do it with the wood. The other bakeries were not as extreme as I was. I was like leading this very austere bakery, cottage bakery. But another thing that happened in 2008 was, people that were graduating college, then were entering a workforce that didn't exist. A career path that was like dissolving. There were so many people that expected one career, and then were graduating, and then into a completely flat for a moment there. But what that really created was this new population of bakers, be it bread bakers, potters, pastry chefs. It was really an interesting time.
And so Carolina Ground also benefited from this new population of bakers. And then the next crisis was the pandemic. So it's been a really interesting thing for these moments in history. I started at a place where I was looking back thinking, what did we lose when we experienced what we always would call progress? What was the loss in that move towards speed and efficiency? And with stone milling, when we decided to close the gap between farmer, miller baker, it was like, okay, we're bringing back the stone mill because that was one piece that should not, I mean, I get it. I get why flour is industrially processed. They remove the oily germ. They make the shelf stable. We have a huge country so let's do all the bread wheat production in the middle, in the bread basket. Let's vertically integrate centralized moves all the mechanisms of industrialized thinking. It is like the architecture of the food scape back in the 40's for this country, and Carolina Ground is part of a movement. So to move back to stone milling saying, well, we don't need extended shelf life. We're going to localize this. Taking a tomato out of your backyard and tasting it, and comparing it to the grocery store tomato. That was like an easy move. The local foods movement took off like fruits and vegetables, very easy. I'm sure it was a lot harder to radiate a tomato so it could be boxed up and shipped than it was to actually bring it back to locality. With grain, it's different. Major infrastructure, we had to rebuild. But regardless, the point is there was this groundswell of support that was just like snowballed with each kind of pinch point in our society over the last 15 years. I guess it has been 10 years, 15 years. 2008, it's been an interesting narrative to just kind of watch it unfold from Carolina Ground. And you could say from natural--
Justine Reichman: As you continue to evolve, what is the most revolutionary part of what you're doing?
Jennifer Lapidus: In my mind, it's this desire to stay small. Any improvements we make at Carolina Ground are for efficiency and quality. I really don't want to be a huge manufacturing plant. What we mill in a year, a small industrial mill probably does in a day. We process a couple 2 to 3000 pounds a day here, so we're not for nothing. We sell flour to bakeries all over the southeast, but I just want to stay a certain size. I really am more interested in lateral growth and community outreach so we do workshops and pop up events. And I want the experience to be something that drives quality of life, not just driven by numbers. And I think that's a new idea. I'm not saying it's an answer that will succeed, but it's what I want, and it's where my focus is.
Justine Reichman: How do you see that impacting the future of this space?
Jennifer Lapidus: I feel like we all rise to the top if we're collaborative. And it's easier to be collaborative if I'm not just being driven by continuously building our numbers every year. Looking back, like, oh, have we increased by 20% this year? 25%? Did we go down a point? I'd love to crack the code of, how small can you be and still be sustainable? And by sustainable, I mean physically on all levels. What is the balance? And it's tricky. Farmers grow a field of grain, and they just wanna sell all of that grain. Bakers just want a specific amount of flour, and the miller is sort of like that person in between, not only the grain itself. A whole other complexity of, what was the weather doing two months ago? What was the weather doing six weeks ago? When did you plant this? There's just getting a good crop out. And then what happens in a year where everybody has a great crop and you have too much grain? Is there a year where nobody has a great crop and you don't have enough grain? It's not simple. But I think one of the things that really keeps all of us going is that collaborative spirit. Because I can call my friends up in Western New York, how is harvest going? And we all kind of care about each other. My friends in California or in the Midwest, here in North Carolina, other friends who are doing something similar.
“It's so much more fun, it's so much more powerful, it's so much more impactful when we can do it together.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: It sounds like such a nice, tight community that's very supportive, collaborative, and shares very similar values. That sounds amazing to be part of. It feels like it feeds itself in many ways. Being part of that, feeds the growth of that. And hopefully, share that sentiment across the board so other people maybe can get on board with it. Because I think it's so much more fun, it's so much more powerful, it's so much more impactful when we can do it together. I know we're wrapping up here, and I want to think about those founders that are listening. Is there one or two things that you might share with somebody if they want to take control of their business, or take a leap of faith, be in another regional mill, or something that you've learned that you think they could benefit from?
Jennifer Lapidus: Wow. It's really, really, really, really, really hard. He told me, when I started my mill, I reached out to a miller that was a reputable miller in Kansas. And he said, you're about to set out on the most difficult agricultural endeavor. It was a fair warning. You're asking me this during harvest. It's a really hard thing to pull off on, and I can't even begin to tell you. But I will say that it's amazing when, okay, we get through it. We've got grain. We're doing it. It's amazing. Look at this flour. This is great. Look at this bread. Look at this pastry that tastes so good because we are milling it. Holding on to the germ oils, which carry all the flavor and nutrients. We're not just making this baked good that is just sugar and egg. It actually has this really interesting complex flavor of forward flour. That's informing this tart or whatever it is. This isn't good. This isn't a piece of advice. I'm just telling you that that's the reward of it. It is not for the faint of heart. If you're just like, oh, this looks like a good way to make money. Then you are definitely not on the right, not saying the right thing.
And the thing is that farmers want to see a mill because they want a place for their grain. But it's really important to have a balance of understanding how much an acre of land is about a ton of flour. How much flour do bakeries use? How much of a stone mill flour will they take? There's some really basic business concepts that you really just, very, very basic. Because I feel like part of the value of what we're doing is the flavor and the taste of our regions. And as soon as you start industrializing it, roller mills, which is fine. It's a very efficient way to process grain. But it really is like white sugar as opposed to, it's a refined product, and it strips the flavor of the grain. So it might be good as a crop that will bring in money, but it's not going to have that same soulful value that the type of flour that is stone milled in a region where you're really all translating and it comes with a story that people understand. It has this intrinsic value that people are passionate about. We do these pop ups, and people are passionate about having access to these ingredients. It's so amazing to be able to watch how excited they are that they get to work with our flour or flour from another mill like ours.
Justine Reichman: For those folks that are interested in tasting your flour, using your flour, how might they get in contact with you?
Jennifer Lapidus: carolinaground.com is our website.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. And if they just wanted to learn more about your journey, maybe connect, what would be the best way to connect with you?
Jennifer Lapidus: I wrote a book called Southern Ground and SpeedPress is my publisher. And a third of the book is narratives. So there's a lot of story, and two thirds of it are recipes. And I did that so that I really wanted to offer the tools for folks to be able to utilize, there's a lot of fear between going from the store to buy flour or flour like ours, and the recipes are drawn from, I curated them from bakeries we work with throughout the southeast. So they're just like an amazing collection, but it's an amazing collection of recipes. But there's also a ton of story. I interviewed all these bakers, and I also told my own story. And really tried to tell the story of what this looks like from the farmer, miller and baker.
Justine Reichman: I hope that the community, whether it's the founders or other people in the space, check out your book. We'll make sure to have a link in the show notes, as well as a link to you so that they can learn more about what you're doing and Carolina Ground. So Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate learning about your journey and how you came to do it. It's really nice to hear from somebody that was able to follow their passion and create a business, and a life for themselves because I know that that is often a challenge for so many.
Jennifer Lapidus: Thank you so much. Justine.
