Hey,
There is a shelf in Endréd that nobody photographs. Sample bags, dated in marker pen, most of them from products that never made it out of the building. Some of them are five years old. We keep them because my father kept his failed trials too — around two hundred published papers on grain, and behind every one of them a stack of results that went nowhere.
Brands love to tell you what they're good at. I think you learn more from the other list. So here are three things our mill still can't make properly, the shortcuts that would fix each one by Friday, and why we haven't taken them.
1. A baguette with a shattering crust
We can make bread at home that I'm genuinely proud of. A proper domed loaf, a soft open crumb, a crust that crackles when it cools on the rack. That's what Bake-Free Home-made bread flour mixture 900g is for, and after a hundred years of milling it's the product I'd put in front of a sceptical baker first.
What we can't do is a baguette. Not a real one. That blistered, glassy crust and the wild irregular holes underneath come from gluten doing something structural — an elastic net that traps gas and then sets. Without it, you're building a scaffold out of psyllium and patience, and psyllium gives you softness and hold, not that violent oven spring.
The fix exists. It's methylcellulose. Add enough and you get chew, stretch, something close to the bounce of wheat. It also behaves like a polymer in your mouth — slightly rubbery, slightly wrong, and it never quite goes away. We've baked it. We didn't like eating it. So there is no baguette mix, and there won't be until we find another way.
2. A genuinely creamy cup soup
Cupster works because the format is honest: your mug, hot water, three minutes, around a euro a serving. Avocado oil rather than seed oils. No MSG — the savoury depth comes from yeast extract, which we'll happily read off the label for you. Red lentil and pea protein doing real work.
What we have never cracked is a proper creamy chowder. Something with weight and silk to it, the sort of soup that coats the spoon. In three minutes, with nothing but hot water, and no dairy.
We've made versions. They are lovely for the first ninety seconds and then they turn. The texture tightens, goes slightly gluey, and you're left with something that tastes like it's trying.
Fixing it is almost embarrassingly easy. Modified starch for body. An emulsifier system so the fat stays suspended. Powdered palm fat for mouthfeel. A dusting of "natural flavouring" to paper over whatever's missing. That combination is sitting in half the instant soups on earth and it works beautifully, right up until you read the back.
3. Lasagne sheets that survive the tray
This one annoys me most, because we have our own pasta factory with Italian equipment and the extruded shapes behave. Sorghum and millet, psyllium holding it together, and it comes out of the pot firm rather than collapsing into the colander.
Big flat sheets are a different animal. They dry unevenly, they develop hairline cracks you can't see until you lift them, and then they fracture when you layer them into a tray with hot sauce. We've had batches where a quarter of the sheets broke in the box before they reached a kitchen.
Gums would stabilise them. Corn starch would make them cheaper and more forgiving to dry. Rice flour would bulk them out. We don't use corn starch or rice fillers in the milled range, and I'm not going to start with lasagne.
What the shortcut shelf actually costs
None of the fixes above are illegal, dangerous or even unusual. They're normal industry practice, and plenty of decent people use them. My objection is narrower than it sounds: every one of them solves a problem we created by refusing to use wheat, and solves it by moving the problem somewhere you can't taste it but can read.
We sieve to 160 microns so gluten-free flour behaves like wheat flour in your hands. That's a milling answer to a milling problem. Gums and flavourings are a chemistry answer to a milling problem, and once you start reaching for them, you stop trying to get better at the thing you're actually supposed to be good at.
So the drawer stays. Three unsolved problems, a few more I haven't bored you with, and a standing instruction to the team that "we could add something" is not a plan.
If you want to see what a hundred years of milling does when it does work, start with the bread mix. Weigh it properly, give the dough a rest, don't rush the bake. It's the one where we had nothing to hide behind — flour, water, your hands, an oven.
And if we ever crack the baguette, you'll hear about it. Loudly.
— Miklos
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Miklos Founder & CEO, Mill & Folks |
