It’s a rainy Saturday morning and the Blue Scorcher Bakery, in Astoria, Ore., is bursting with business. The 12-year-old co-op is cranking out organic scones, cardamom rolls, oatcakes and many other treats to a line of devoted, local customers.
“Who knew there’d be so much demand in this town,” said co-owner Joe Garrison. “We’re just doing what we love … take the very best ingredients we can find, and apply the simplest process and we come up with something delicious that people really seem to want.”
For Garrison’s delicate baking, his most-critical ingredient is the flour. For that, he turns to Azure.
“Every time we get in a shipment of Azure’s Unifine flour, it comes out fluffier and fresher than our other shipments,” Garrison said. “I just know I’m going to make something special and delectable with that. The pastry side of our business has surpassed the bread baking, and for that we need an exceptional pastry flour. Azure’s Unifine flour fits our needs perfectly. Our customers are voting with their dollars and the verdict is in. We’ve been delighted.”
All of Azure’s Unifine flour is milled at Azure’s mill in Dufur, Ore., one of a few such mills in the country. Azure produces more than 125 varieties of Unifine flour under the Azure Market brand, so there’s something for every baking application – from everyday bread-baking to lavish cakes to specialized, commercial baking.
“If all you’ve ever baked with is store-bought, all-purpose flour, you’ll be amazed by the difference in flavor and consistency of Unifine flour,” said David Stelzer, CEO of Azure. “Plus, the Unifine mill grinds just about anything. So we can mill all kinds of grains and legumes, from barley and gluten-free brown rice flour to spelt flour, quinoa flour and certified organic, heirloom wheat pastry flour.”
No other company produces the variety nor the volume of Unifine flour that Azure does.
Unifine flour is one of the foundational products in the new Azure Market product line that features the highest quality at the lowest possible price. (Read more about the Azure Farm and Azure Market transition.)
How Unifine Makes Healthier Flours
The name Unifine comes from the milling process itself. It means the process takes just one step – not two – and it produces a very fine, uniform grind. Not only that, Unifine milling preserves more of the natural nutrients of the grain.
Unlike Unifine milling, typical commercial-milling processes utilize some form of grinding or rolling that produces heat that degrades the oils in the grain. Those oils contain important vitamins and nutrients, and flours produced with such heat provide less nutrition.
“Many manufacturers imply that 'stone-ground’ is a product benefit,” Stelzer said. “But it’s not really. It’s better than steel rollers, but it’s not nearly as good as the Unifine process.”
Steel roller mills can make whole-wheat flour, but only by separating the grain’s constituent parts, adding water and then forcing them back together. It’s an extremely inefficient process, and the stamping, crushing, squeezing, hydrating and rolling compromises the nutrition and the flavor of the flour. As a result, commercial manufacturers add the vitamins and minerals back into the flour during processing and then label it as “enriched flour.”
In Azure’s Unifine process, the entire bran, germ and endosperm of the grain are processed into a nutritious, whole-grain flour in one step. Instead of crushing, or cutting the grain, the Unifine process uses a high-speed rotor with a single-pass impact system to instantly pulverize the kernels of grains with no heat involved.
“With the Unifine process, the oil molecules are left whole,” Stelzer said. “That’s the main reason we have longer shelf life, better flavor and more nutrition.”
Ultimately, Unifine flours are packed with many times the nutritional value than commercially milled flours. It has almost four times as much dietary fiber, more than twice as much potassium and three times as much magnesium.
How Azure Makes Unifine Flour
Azure's mill manager
guides the Organic Soft White Wheat into the stainless-steel
feed hopper that was designed
and built in-house. We build
almost all of our
state-of-the-art equipment.
Once ready, bags are
stacked up on pallets, ready
for delivery to customers and
for use in any future
baking plans.
Unifine's Origins
The idea for a Unifine milling process dates back to the 1930s. John Wright, an English businessman, built the first rotor mill in London, but it was destroyed in World War II.
When Wright immigrated to the U.S., he went to Washington State University, Pullman, for assistance. Engineers there helped him make improvements to his original design and developed what is now known as the Unifine process.
Only three mills were produced from the work at Washington State, and none were used commercially until 1962 when Fairfield Milling began milling its first flour under the Unifine name. A second Unifine mill began operation, under the label Flour Girls, in the late 1970s. Flour Girls became a popular local brand and was used by home bakers to make light, whole-wheat bread without the dense texture that comes from traditional whole-wheat flours.
“In the early 1990s, we had many Azure customers from the Spokane-area who started requesting the Flour Girls brand,” Stelzer said. “People really liked it, so we picked it up and we sold a lot of it. We had a stone mill at the time and I could see that the Unifine flour was a much better product.”
Eventually, one of the two Unifine mills had to shut down, so Stelzer was able to negotiate a deal with the aging owner.
“The company was going out of business so we made him an offer, brought the whole thing here and set it up,” Stelzer said. “We used it for a couple years with good results, so we decided to make a significant investment in the Unifine technology. We had it reverse-engineered and built three more.”
The demand for Azure’s Unifine flour has increased significantly in the past 15 years, with output approaching 2 million pounds of flour per year. Twenty years ago, Azure sold two bags of hard red wheat bread-making flour to every one bag of whole-grain pastry flour. Today, that has turned around: very fine whole-grain pastry flour outsells bread flour three to one.
“The Unifine pastry flour has been the go-to flour for years,” Stelzer said. “It’s a whole-wheat pastry flour that acts like white, but it’s packed with nutrients."
"The main difference is you have to add a little more water," continued Stelzer. "I’ve seen wedding cakes made out of this whole-wheat flour. No one would have known. It looked just like a regular white cake, but with all the nutrients and flavor of whole wheat. And it makes the best pie crust you’ve ever tasted, that’s for sure.”
Bakers using Unifine pastry flour get the fluffy texture they prefer, and they have discovered the same thing that artisan bread bakers have known for years when using Azure’s whole grain bread flour; the “nutty” taste and smell of whole grains are so much more lively and exciting when the soul of the kernel is left intact during the milling process.
Allergen-Free Unifine Milling
Stelzer recently oversaw a major transformation of the mill that resulted in a high level of food safety certification, including the addition of allergen-free processing. With the change, Azure can now offer dozens of allergen-free flours, grains and dried foods processed at the mill in Dufur.
“SQF certification means we’re now fully equipped to handle gluten-free products in an allergen-free environment,” he said.
Stelzer’s own food sensitivities have been a driving force behind the mill’s transformation.
“If I even walk into a room where there’s powdered milk being used, I’ll get a reaction. So I understand the challenges of that. We work really hard to provide foods that are safe for all types of diets,” he said. “We’re getting more and more requests every year for gluten-free and allergen-free products and our mill operation is an important step in that direction.”
In the world of gluten-free baking, rice flour is the most common ingredient. But rice is very difficult to mill properly into a fine, baking flour and it can be prohibitively expensive.
“Traditional milling processes can’t handle rice very well,” Stelzer said. “With our Unifine mill, we can do that ourselves – completely gluten-free rice flour – and it’s far better, cheaper and easier to use than anything else on the market. This grind is so fine, and it’s a completely dry process. Anyone else charges three to four times as much as we do for gluten-free rice flour that is this fine.”
Stelzer also believes that localized milling as an important component of the farm-to-table movement.
“We buy our wheat and grains from local sources, mill it right here, and ship it directly to the consumer,” he said. “That’s a good model … a more direct food chain. It’s good for the environment, and it produces a product that’s much healthier and better tasting. I’d like to see a lot more of it, in homes and in bakeries.”
The Blue Scorcher Co-op Bakery, in Astoria, Ore., was originally founded as the Bread Collective because a small group of people wanted to keep their bread production organic and localized. It’s an ethos of healthy sustainability that matches perfectly with Azure’s core values.
“We source our ingredients locally, as much as we possibly can,” Garrison said. “Azure is a good, Oregon company that we love doing business with. They think like we do, and they produce the best pastry flour. We can’t have flour that varies or fluctuates because our customers want the same, delicious biscuit or scone every time. Azure’s Unifine flour delivers that. The difference in aroma, texture and flavor is remarkable.”