A few weeks ago I was eating breakfast and half-watching something on my phone when a graphic came up: a redrawn food pyramid. Whole grains had been shuffled down near the bottom. Not the good bottom — the base, the foundation — the other bottom. The eat-sparingly end. Twenty years ago the same grains were the floor the whole thing stood on.
I put my toast down. Then I picked it up again, because it was good toast.
A hundred years is a long time to keep changing your mind
My family has been milling grain in Endrőd since before anyone drew a pyramid about food at all. My father published somewhere around two hundred papers on grain over his career. He kept a folder — a real cardboard one — of nutrition charts clipped from newspapers across four decades. Fat was the villain, then sugar, then carbohydrates, then specific carbohydrates, then the gut, then protein, now fibre. He never threw a single clipping away. I asked him once why he bothered. He said that when you have the full set, you stop being surprised.
That folder is the reason this company plans in decades and not in guideline cycles. A mill is not a spreadsheet. You buy a sieve that separates to 160 microns because you believe in what that fineness does to a loaf, and then you live with that decision for fifteen years. You build a dedicated gluten-free mill because you want to be certain, not because certainty was trending that quarter. Equipment is a slower kind of promise than a press release.
I have broken that rule twice
I should be honest, because otherwise this reads as a lecture and I don't much like those.
The first time was years ago. Gluten-free pasta back then meant pale, smooth, almost translucent — and people had been trained to expect that. I was told, repeatedly, that our pasta looked too rustic. Too flecked. Too much like something had actually been ground rather than assembled. So I signed off on a version that leaned harder on starch, lighter on whole flour. It looked exactly right on the shelf. It cooked fine. It tasted of nothing at all — a structure with no argument inside it. We stopped making it. That's a large part of why the milled range today carries no corn starch or rice fillers. I'm not quoting a principle at you. I'm quoting a mistake.
The second time was more recent and more embarrassing, because I should have learned. Protein was the number everybody wanted on the front of the pack. We prototyped something designed around that number rather than around the eating of it. The number was excellent. The food was dull — it had that worthy, slightly sandy quality that makes you finish the bowl out of duty. We shelved it. Red lentil and pea protein are in our products because they genuinely belong there, not because a headline asked for them.
Twice, then. Both times the trend was gone within about three years. The regret lasted longer.
Fibre is having its moment, and I'm not taking a victory lap
Here's the awkward part. Right now the pendulum has swung back towards fibre — whole-food fibre specifically, which is suddenly the thing everyone is talking about. If I were a different kind of person I'd write a triumphant email about how we were right all along.
But that would be the same mistake wearing a flattering hat. If I celebrate the guidelines when they agree with me, I've admitted the guidelines get a vote on what we grind. They don't. We mill heritage grains because of what they do to flavour and texture and to the way a meal sits with you afterwards — and because a hundred years of hands in this trade is a decent evidence base of its own. Sorghum doesn't become more nutritious because a committee redrew a chart, and it doesn't become less so either.
If you want a quiet place to start, start with Sorghum flour 450g. It's the grain our range is built around and the one I'd defend in any room. It's mild — properly mild, not bland — with a faint sweetness that makes it generous rather than assertive. A few honest ways to use it:
- Swap a third of the flour in a gluten-free bake for sorghum and see what happens to the crumb. It softens the whole thing.
- Thicken a soup or a stew with a spoonful whisked into cold water first. No claggy aftertaste.
- Pancakes. Sorghum, a little milk of your choosing, an egg or flax. Sunday food.
The pyramid will be redrawn again. I'd put money on it. Whole grains will climb back up, or something else will take their place, and somebody will make a graphic about it and I'll see it at breakfast and put my toast down for a second.
Then I'll pick it up again. The mill stays where it is.
— Miklos
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Miklos Founder & CEO, Mill & Folks |
