[1] The fourth annual [2] Kneading Conference has just ended. This yearly gathering takes place in Skowhegan, Maine, and has been a growing influence in providing our regional food system with locally-produced grains. If you haven’t had the chance to attend, a New York Times article by Marian Burros covers this year’s conference and the Artisan Bread Fair that accompanies it:

Their Daily Bread Is a Local Call Away

 

THE 250 farmers, bakers, millers, scientists and just plain eaters, all of them fanatics about the kind of bread that is so good it doesn’t need butter or jam, gathered here last month for the fourth annual Kneading Conference. They spent two days at the fairgrounds talking about locally grown, mostly organic grains — and how, after 100 years of neglect, breads made from them are beginning to pop up, in limited quantities, nationwide.

 

There were plenty of freshly baked loaves, hot out of an assortment of portable bread ovens, to persuade the uninitiated that nothing tastes as good as bread made from richly flavored varieties of grain.

 

The Kneading Conference is part of a quiet revolution whose center is Skowhegan, a town in central Maine that produced enough grain in the 1830s to feed 100,000 people. As interest in local food has risen, federal and state agriculture departments are underwriting experiments to find the best varieties of wheat, and artisanal bakers are eagerly trying the flours they produce. But it is the conference that has helped turn the scattered movement into the next new thing for locavores, and the practical topics discussed this year — building more gristmills, making old farm manuals available — reveal its progress from infancy to adolescence.

 

[3] To read article, including mentions of Borealis Breads and Stone Turtle Baking and Cooking School >

 

The above photo is from this year’s conference. To see more photos of the [4] 2010 Kneading Conference and [5] Bread Fair >