The field was eleven kilometres from our mill. I'd driven past it for years without looking properly.
Sorghum stands tall and goes a sort of dusty bronze at the end of summer, and if you're not paying attention it reads as maize that's lost its nerve. A grain merchant mentioned it in passing: there's white sorghum out your way, food grade, lovely sample. He sells the lot for birdseed.
Birdseed. Two villages away. We were sourcing sorghum from considerably further afield at the time.
The awkward conversation
I turned up on a Tuesday in a car with flour on the seats and no appointment, which is not how agricultural business is done in Hungary or anywhere else. He was fixing something on a trailer and did not stop fixing it while we talked.
I asked what he did with the crop. Feed, mostly. Birdseed contracts. Steady, unglamorous, paid on time.
Then I asked the question that made it awkward: would he sell it to us for people to eat?
He put the spanner down. Not because he was offended — because it genuinely hadn't come up. Food-grade sorghum means a different conversation entirely: storage moisture, cleaning, where the crop sits in the rotation, what's sprayed and when, whether the dryer runs too hot. Feed buyers don't ask. We were asking, and he was weighing up whether we'd still be asking in three years or whether we'd vanish and leave him with a crop and no contract.
Fair question. We left it there. I bought nothing that day.
Eighteen months of bad loaves
What followed wasn't romance. It was test bakes.
Sorghum is a wonderful grain and a difficult flour. It has no gluten, obviously — that's the point — so the structure has to come from somewhere else. The particle size decides almost everything: too coarse and the crumb goes sandy on the tongue, too fine and the loaf collapses on itself like a bad tent. We mill our gluten-free flours down to around 160 microns in our own dedicated gluten-free mill, which is roughly the fineness people expect from wheat flour. Getting his sorghum to behave at that fineness took longer than we'd budgeted for.
Harvest to harvest, the grain shifts. A dry August gives you a harder kernel and a different water uptake. So we baked. Then we adjusted the psyllium husk — our binder, and the reason the dough holds together without corn starch or rice filler doing the heavy lifting. Then we baked again. My wife stopped asking what was for dinner and started asking which loaf was tonight's.
Somewhere around month fourteen we got a loaf that sliced thin without crumbling, toasted properly, and tasted faintly sweet and nutty rather than of nothing at all. We made it again the next week to be sure it wasn't luck. It wasn't.
What ended up in the bag
That grain is in our Bake-Free Home-made sorghum bread flour mixture 900g. Nine hundred grams, mixed and ready — you bring water, yeast and a bit of patience. No gluten, no corn starch or rice fillers standing in for real grain.
His name isn't printed on the pack. He asked us not to bother, in the way people do when they'd quietly like it but won't say so. He still sells most of his crop as feed. We take a share of it, every year, at a price that reflects what it actually is.
Good grain was growing eleven kilometres from a mill run by four generations of my family, and we were buying ours from hundreds of kilometres away. That's the honest version of the story. Sometimes heritage isn't a tradition you inherit. It's a field you finally stop driving past.
— Miklos
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Miklos Founder & CEO, Mill & Folks |
