Yankee Hill, CA - Home of Miller's Bake House  
Our Process...
The Mission: From the very beginning our intent has been to provide the best quality bread available. A bread that illustrates the full expression of the grain, and therefore gives you the most flavorful, pleasing, nutritious loaf possible.

The Fermentation: All of Miller’s breads are leavened with a natural starter or fermentation of freshly-milled flour and water. There are advantages to baking with a natural ferment versus using baker’s yeast, especially when baking with whole grain flours.

A natural sourdough starter:

  • Lowers the pH of the dough allowing for the full release of minerals from the bran and germ.
  • Naturally conditions the dough so that it bakes properly in the oven.
  • Creates a more easily digestible bread.
  • Enhances the development of richer, more complex flavors.
  • Acts as a natural preservative for the baked loaf.
The Mill: Nourishment begins in the soil. Healthy, nutrient-rich soil provides healthy food. We’ve always been very careful choosing our farmers, but when the grain reaches our bakery, the stewardship falls into our hands. And here, our beautiful Austrian-made stone mill is central to everything. A grain of wheat has amazing properties of self-preservation. It can remain viable for years on end with virtually no degradation of the neatly packaged vitamins, minerals, lipids, enzymes, carbohydrates and proteins contained within. All of which are present for the sole purpose of building new life in the form of a sprouting wheat plant. This seed is just waiting for moisture and warmth to transform itself into a living plant.

The moment the seed is opened is the moment of its greatest life-giving potential.
By grinding the grain in our stone mill, in the bakery, and using this flour while it is fresh, I like to think that we channel that life-giving energy into the bread we bake. One of the most important things we do is actually what we don’t do. We don’t sift out the bran and germ to make white flour. The most nutritious and flavorful qualities of the flour stay right where they are.

The dough: The sweet, malty, smell of fresh-off-the-mill flour mixed with water, sourdough culture and sea salt is delightful. That smell, when the water is added to the flour, more than anything else tells me there is something special in that brew. You don’t get it with flour that is not milled fresh and you certainly don’t get it when using white flour. After mixing the dough in our unique, Swiss Artofex mixer, we let it sit in bulk for several hours. After the initial fermentation, we divide and shape the dough and place the formed loaves into baskets, on cloth, or in pans for the final ferment.

The oven: The day before baking, our brick, wood-fired oven is loaded with wood and the fire is set. The fire gradually works its way back into the chamber and becomes hotter and hotter. From wispy yellow flames to beautiful, iridescent blue flames to brilliant, pulsing golden embers. After 16 to 20 hours, the fire is reduced to ashes, and the oven is ready to be scraped, mopped and brushed clean. The heat stored in the cement cap surrounding the fire-brick chamber is what will provide the heat necessary to bake with throughout the day. Ten hours after the hearth has been cleaned, and the heat has had a chance to even out and mellow it is time to bake.

It starts slowly after the shaped loaves are loaded into the oven. For the first ten minutes the dough is still porous and hasn’t yet set. Moisture escapes and fills the oven chamber with ‘bread vapor’. Gradually, the crust forms and turns the loaf into a sort of pressure cooker. As a result of kneading and fermentation, a cell structure, or starch/protein matrix has developed in the dough creating tiny steam chambers. You can easily see this matrix when you cut into a finished loaf.

The bread in this masonry, wood-fired oven is baked with conduction, convection, and radiant heat. No burner is blasting, no electric heating elements are buzzing. The oven is silent. We feed it dough and it gives us bread in return.

A beautiful process from start to finish. That’s what we do.