Welcome to Rouge, the city's true local loaf.

"When you’re out there and you see somebody working hard, toiling over their crop and land ... then there is a sense of responsibility. You have to create the best damn loaf."

Thursday morning, as he slid eight loaves, each stenciled and scored like artwork, into the Niedlov's Bakery & Cafe ovens, Erik Zilen – a little flour here, a lot of vision there – reached the end of a long journey.

"We've been thinking about this for four years," he said.

This?

"The Rouge loaf," he said.

Rouge is Chattanooga's first true local loaf of bread. Locally grown. Locally milled. Locally baked.

Rouge is a rich brown, with bran-textured-crust, and soft, sweet taste. This local loaf, about the size of a rugby football, is also the size of the world.

"It's a humbling reminder that the craft and grains are bigger than you," Erik began. "This 200-year old wheat from France and a small little bakery in Chattanooga. It's pretty awesome."

A few years ago, Erik and wife Lauren, owners of Niedlov's, began wondering:

Can we bake a loaf of bread that is entirely local? Grown from local grains on a local farm, milled and cleaned by local hands, baked by our own bakers?

Niedlov's ships organic flour from Central Milling in Idaho, nearly two thousand miles away; it's been harvested, cleaned and milled by dozens of unknown hands; Erik and Lauren couldn't name half the people involved in their own bread.

They didn't know anyone regionally growing wheat, much less milling or cleaning it.

(Milling? Cleaning? Don't worry. I asked the same questions.)

So, Erik began to rustle up a vision: what if local farmers grew local grains that local millers could prepare for local bakers and brewers to use?

Around the same time, I, rather naively, began my own experiment:

Can I bake my own loaf of bread? Start to finish? My hands doing the work: sowing, growing, harvesting, cleaning, milling, baking.

For thousands of years, humans have been growing grains that become bread. Yet, I am 50, with two degrees and three decades of career work, and I do not know how to perform one of humankind's most essential tasks.

Every loaf of bread in my life? Others have made it.

Until now.

Thursday morning, as we baked Rouge loaves, we also baked a much smaller, unrefined loaf.

"The Cook loaf," Erik said.

Many adjectives were used to describe it; most I won't print here.

"Gritty?" Sarah suggested.

"Earthy?" Erik added.

"Shitty?" I offered.

Regardless, the loaf was mine.

Last year, Erik and I set off on parallel adventures to produce local loaves of bread. Don't conflate our two journeys. Erik, the master baker, is trying to marvelously change our region's food landscape. Me? I often got my chaff handed to me, no idea the difference between my spelt and endorsporm.

"Sperm," Erik corrected. "Endosperm."

This is our story.

Sign up for Food as a Verb

It's completely free. Food as a Verb is devoted to telling the stories of local food, farmers, chefs and restaurants in SE Tennessee.

Subscribe

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Nobody's growing organic grain in these parts. Most grain is grown commercially, usually in the flatter fields and large-scale farms of west Tennessee; plus, in the years following World War II, most heirloom grains were replaced with high-yield varieties.

So says Erik. He'd been hunting for an east Tennessee farmer growing both heirloom and organic wheat. Kept coming up empty.

The first Local Loaf ingredient we needed? A willing farmer.

Cue Dr. Robin Fazio.

In November 2023, Fazio and his Baylor School Gardens students sowed a small test plot of Appalachian White in the campus garden.

"I love growing wheat," said Fazio, a sixth-generation farmer who, years ago, milled his south Georgia wheat with a portable mill and sold at Main St. Farmers' Market, Lupi's and Pruetts, among others. (Mill's since been sold.) The trial plot of Appalachian White, a hard winter wheat, would give Erik a chance to play around with this variety.

It was also ground zero for my Cook Loaf project. Here was the grain I'd need.

Soon, the seeds germinated.

Over the spring, the grain began to grow.

But the 50 x 50' plot wasn't large enough for Niedlov's, which needs 1000s of pounds of grain regularly.

Cue Murray Brett and Dayspring Farms in Danielsville, Georgia.

"He was growing organic wheat," said Erik.

On 95 acres some three hours from Chattanooga, Dayspring grows varieties of organic wheat, including Rouge, an heirloom from pre-WWII France.

"After WWII, grains were introduced to intense, scientific plant breeding for the purpose to get the highest yield crop, not necessarily to match quality," Erik began. "Heirloom wheat are defined as varieties that were developed before WWII, and have had limited breeding selection. Heirloom varieties have deeper roots, are rich in flavor, denser in nutrients."

This is why Murray's Dayspring Farm is so special.

Erik – who geeks out on heirloom wheat the way others do college football – had found an organic and heirloom grower 160 miles away.

"Incredible," he said.

Erik and fellow Niedlov's bakers took repeated trips to see Murray. A friendship formed. Murray, who sells to a Michelin-star in Atlanta and breweries in Athens, also cleans his grain with his own gravity table.

Erik began to see a path forming.

Erik hemmed and hawed for most of the winter. Can I really do this?

Earlier this spring, his phone rang: this is Murray. I'm bringing you 1000 pounds of Rouge next week.

It was time to mill ...

"Or get off the pot," Erik said.

The missing ingredient? A mill and a miller.

"I know just the right folks," I told Erik.

Ron and Cynthia Shaffer own Red Clay Farm, a 50-acre organic farm in Bradley County. Easily among the kindest farmers we know, they are also among the most prolific.

They also own a mill.

"A Tyrolian stone mill," said Ron. "It's wrapped in Tyrolian pine."

Years ago, they were vacationing in Louisville and spied a magazine cover spotlighting a local miller. Hmmm, we should try that someday.

In 2016, they Ebay'd an Austrian-built mill from Spokane, arriving without any instructions. ("The previous baker threw them away," Ron said.)

The mill is gorgeous, with the singular Marie Kondo presence of a grand piano or Rothko. Forgot its function; you could place it like furniture in the living room and just gape.

It's also 750-pounds heavy.

They called their neighbor, who has extensions on his tractor that could lift the mill.

"He's also legally blind," Ron said.

It was an agrarian + surrealist comedy sketch: a legally blind farmer on his tractor navigating an Austrian stone mill with a quarter-inch leeway on either side of the door as Ron and Cynthia were hollering: steer this way, that way, lookout for the wall!

The mill has two 18" circular stones. At the top, grain is fed into the hopper, then onto the two stones. Only the top stone turns.

A stone mill is different from a steel mill, often used in large-commercial production. White bread from white flour? That's a steel mill.

"When you buy flour in the store that is white, they've removed the bran, endosperm, leaving the germ," Ron said.

A stone mill mills it all together. Thus: whole wheat. Stone-milled flour is more nutritious because nothing is removed. (Red Clay gets its organic grain from Azure Standard in Oregon.)

After the mill-or-get-off-the-pot decision, Erik called Ron: I have 1000 pounds of wheat coming. Can I use your mill?

Of course, said Ron. (Yep. Among the kindest.)

And the Local Loaf Project had its mill and miller. This spring, Erik began traveling there twice a month to mill Rogue grain, 50-pound bags, every half-hour.

Meanwhile, at the Baylor School garden, it was June: harvest time. The Appalachian White had dried, turning into beautiful waves of grain.

Over the course of three June afternoons and evenings, Robin and I went old-school on that grain: first with a scythe, then, a hand sickle.

It was work unlike any other: no fossil fuels, using tools similar to centuries ago, working side-by-side with my best mate. How far removed was this from the Fertile Crescent template? Metal, sweat, grain, friends.

A lot of the field had lodged – or fallen over – so we harvested maybe a half of what we'd planted back in the fall. Chopping, cutting, then hauling to a flat bed trailer for the cleaning.

Ok, cleaning. Here's what I learned:

Each individual stalk of wheat contains berries. Notice the head of grain. Inside that? The berry that becomes wheat flour. Inside the berry?

The bran, germ and endospo - sorry, endosperm.

Once the heads are cut, or harvested, they're cleaned. In modern agriculture, this takes place in an industrial cleaner. The ingenious Murray at Dayspring built his own a gravity-table that sorts the berries by weight.

We had neither.

Onto a blue Ace Hardware tarp, we unloaded our wheat grain. Needing to remove the berry from the protective husk or shell, we cycled through tools, like Goldilocks, looking for the right fit: rakes, then shovels, then flat-head shovels, then dancing, tap-dancing, eventually going Chubby Checker on the grain.

See the berries on the tarp? And the chaff leftover in my hand?

We carried the wheat berries in a silver bowl to a box fan. Overhead, a hawk watched, occasionally crying out – as if alarmed, having never seen grain being treated such ways – from a nearby elm.

One bowl with the wheat berries was held above the fan, with a second bowl below. We poured slowly into the airstream, which blew the unwanted lighter chaff away, as the heavier berries falling into our bowl below.

Repeat: a dozen times.

This is old-school cleaning.

Three afternoons later, we had our grain sealed in three freezer bags.

It was one of the proudest moments of my adult life.

Growing up, I'd read the Gospel verses about separating the wheat from the chaff. The analogy was weirdly ancient, until now.

We'd literally separated wheat from chaff.

Part of me felt cleaned, too. During this whole project, I got my chaff handed to me, over and over. All my questions – What is chaff? How do you mill grain? How do you use a scythe? What the hell is endosperm? – served as a long reminder of how far I've drifted from the shore, these answers like beacons back to some essential knowledge I'd lost from my breadbasket ancestors.

This work felt honest, genuine, empowering.

With our somewhat-cleaned grain, we met Erik at Ron and Cynthia's mill. I was on cloud nine.

Erik, like a good college professor, gave us a brief lesson: consider the bran like the shell of an egg, he said, and the germ is the yolk where the moisture and protein are held.

He looked at my face.

"Wonder if I should just draw you a picture," he offered.

Another lesson: old-school-Chubby Checker-with-shovels-cleaned grain ain't always the cleanest. As I poured into the hopper, I saw black specks, a little dirt, possibly some insect wings and legs, and an awful lot of uncleaned wheat.

"Hmm. This will be crunchy bread," Erik said.

"Gritty bread," added Sarah.

I milled my gritty grain to make gritty bread, ending up with three bags of semi-brown flour.

"Hope you don't get pulled over," Erik said.

Will it bake? You know ... well?

"We'll put some lipstick on it," he laughed. "Lots of sugar. Maybe muffins. Or dog treats. Croutons. It'll be ... something."

Indeed, it was something.

Which brings us to Thursday morning, three days ago.

We'd returned to Niedlov's. It was baking day.

Niedlov's is currently baking a dozen or so Rouge loaves per day. The process is richly scientific and complex: at least 36 hours that involve leaven, salt, water, fermentation, refrigeration, shaping, molding, cutting, stenciling ... then baking.

The Cook loaf? It was unscientific, uncouth, dry as Dune. Erik did his heroic best, writing a recipe, adding – adding again – extra bread flour. Nearby, pastry chefs Chris St. Clair and Jeremy Crow bore witness.

One was not like the other.

But some miracles simply aren't possible.

Hesitantly, we each tore off little squares – Sarah, Erik, don't you want more than that? – of the Cook Loaf.

"Well," Erik began, "there's a lot going on. Hmm, what's the right word?"

"Dry?" I offered. (Sarah tried to respond, but was still chewing.)

"You know how it kind of takes the moisture out of your mouth?" he said. "Yeah, we don't want that."

We'd baked two loaves. One got accidentally left behind on a nearby counter, sliced up, which, in bakery rules, is a green-light: anyone walking by grabs, tastes, evaluates.

It was like a prank loaf; never in the history of Niedlov's had such poor bread been so casually and unapologetically offered. (Was it the insect legs? The wrong grain? Was it the shovels?)

"Oh, Erik," one baker said, "why'd you do this?"

To me, it tasted unconditionally good. I loved it before I even had a bite.

Biting into the Rouge, though, is a wonderland. It is elevated, uplifting, doing all the olfactory things that the best loaves do, reminiscent of a time when bakeries and bakers were at the center of town.

(You can buy Rouge at Niedlov's and the Main St. Farmers' Market.)

Rouge also carries the sweetly powerful taste of relationships. Murray's in that bread. Robin's in that bread. Pre-WWII France is in that bread.

It becomes precious because it is known.

"When you’re out there and you see somebody working hard, toiling over their crop and land, you see him with the cleaner and all this effort put into this little thing, then there is a sense of responsibility," Erik said. "You have to create the best damn loaf."

Yes, Rouge is our city's local loaf, but it still wouldn't exist without farmers from north Georgia to France, mill-makers in Austria, a legally blind neighbor and his tractor, high school students sowing grain, a big-hearted Bradley County couple, Erik, Lauren, Robin, Sarah ... you can stretch this list as long as you want.

In the past, Erik would click laptop buttons, ordering grain from Idaho, which would arrive by truck days later. It was isolating, sort of amnesia-producing.

"You just forget," he said. "You don't have to lean on anyone."

But now?

"Ron and I now have relationships," he said. "Murray and I have talked a lot about our families when we are together – mainly about the blessings and hardships that come with family business."

As Rouge hits the shelves, Erik and Lauren's vision is just beginning. They're in talks with an organic farmer in Carthage who wants to grow grains. Niedlov's is planning to purchase its own 40" mill, allowing locally-milled grain for Chattanooga restaurants, brewers, other bakeries.

"This is for the community," Erik said.

As for me and my gritty bread? Sure, it's dry and crunchy in ways no bread should be. Most of all? It tastes like humble pie.

It was ludicrous to think I could do this on my own. Nothing I can do on my own.

In this Local Loaf journey, there was one ingredient with the most leaven.

Relationships and community.

That's what makes it all rise.

All photography by Sarah Unger (sarah@foodasaverb.com)

All design by Alex DeHart

All words by David Cook (david@foodasaverb.com)

Story ideas, questions, feedback? Interested in sponsorship or advertising opportunities? Email us: david@foodasaverb.com and sarah@foodasaverb.com

This story is 100% human generated; no AI chatbot was used in the creation of this content.