Cyrus Pringle
Vermont botanist and wheat breeder… and the name of our newest bread!
Nov. 2009
Only a few weeks ago, I was still saying that we were years away from baking a bread made exclusively from Vermont-grown wheat. Well, I am happy to say that I couldn’t have been more wrong. On September 1, 2009, ten years to the day after we sold our first loaf of bread, Champlain Valley Mills (from Westport, N.Y., on the west side of Lake Champlain) milled 3000 lbs. of flour from wheat brought to them by Tom Kenyon of Aurora Farms/Nitty Gritty Grains in Charlotte, VT. This was the third year in a row that Tom had attempted to grow hard red winter wheat (the type needed for bread making) for us. The first two years yielded nothing but cattle feed, but the initial tests results from this year’s wheat looked good enough to try milling it and making bread with it. Being accustomed to baking with the finest organic wheat Kansas has to offer, I was hopeful that we could use a percentage of this Vermont wheat in some of our breads. Imagine my surprise when I combined this flour with water, yeast, and salt in the mixing bowl and found that it made a familiar-feeling dough! The resulting bread, although not perfect, was surprisingly good. A week later we are making bread that is beyond my wildest dreams of what we could do with an indigenous Vermont bread. The addition of some whole wheat from our long-time supplier and friend Ben Gleason of Bridport adds to the Vermont pedigree and gives this bread a depth of flavor.
Within the next couple of weeks we will be unveiling this true Vermont bread as a daily variety in the stores that we service. In honor of Dr. Cyrus Guernsey Pringle (1838-1911), a renowned botanist and wheat breeder from Charlotte(whose wheat varieties are being revived today), we are naming this bread with (literal) roots in Charlotte simply Cyrus Pringle: From Vermont.
Ingredients: Organic wheat flour from Aurora Farms, water, organic whole wheat flour from Gleason Grains, baker’s yeast, organic barley malt, salt. Net wt. 1 lb.
To learn more about Cyrus Pringle, go to http://www.uvm.edu/~plantbio/pringle/pringlebio.html
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