Welcome to Trukenbrod
Trukenbrod Mill and Bakery
Ours is a family-owned, farm-based micro-bakery. We make nutritious and satisfying loaves of whole-grain bread through the age-old techniques of stone-milling, long fermentations, and wood-fired baking.
The Trukenbrod Bakery is currently closed. My last bake was on 5 August 2008. My primary reason for closing the bakeshop is the accumulated physical toll it has taken on me to produce bread in volume from grain milling to delivery. Additionally, the huge price increases we’ve all seen in grains and fuel have had an effect. I will not price my bread beyond reach of the average consumer, on a dollars per pound basis. I will be participating in an important project during my absence from baking. It is a research effort involving many people--farmers, bakers and plant breeding specialists--with a goal of developing new (or possibly very old) cultivars of wheat particularly suitable to the Northeast. Organic growers in northern New England and Quebec have a tough time finding wheat varieties that are nutritious and tasty, disease resistant, have good baking characteristics, and a decent yield. The modern varieties of wheat currently available have been bred for the requirements of mega-agriculture: essentially these wheats yield well and make a nice loaf of bread, but they perform less well without the standard applications of fungicide, and do especially poorly in our overly wet growing seasons. In addition to new crosses, we are evaluating some ancient members of the wheat tribe, grains such as einkorn and emmer. These grains, dating back ten to twenty thousand years, tend to be significantly higher in nutrition than modern wheat and to be much hardier in our unpredictable growing environment. For more information about these heritage grains, please consult www.growseed.org.
I am very grateful for your faithful, on-going support of my baking efforts. It has been a real pleasure to meet so many people who have made Trukenbrod bread a regular part of their meals. At the same time, Trukenbrod bread would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of skilled farmers such as Jack Lazor, Michel Gaudreau, Archie Blankers, Wilhelm Brand, Jim Geer and Ben Gleason. I am truly indebted to all these people for the wonderful wheat, rye, spelt, corn and oats that they produce under challenging environmental conditions.
Yours for good bread,
John Mellquist, owner and baker, Trukenbrod Mill and Bakery, Vershire, Vermont.
