Patrick Shaw-Kitch, proper, and his spouse, Laura Huss, inside their Brooklyn bakery.
Photograph: Victor Llorente
In 1688, Joseph Haviland was granted the fitting to construct a two-story timber-frame tidewater mill on the finish of Ocean Avenue in East Rockaway, Nassau County. The 336-year-old East Rockaway Grist Mill is now a museum and registered nationwide historic website, and the closest factor New York Metropolis has needed to a correct native flour mill, till now. Brooklyn Granary & Mill might sound historical — or a minimum of like a storefront that will have accomplished properly throughout the 2010s’ artisanal-Brooklyn heyday — however when it opens in February, will probably be a state-of-the-art gristmill that feeds a contemporary bakery, steps away from the Gowanus Canal.
Patrick Shaw-Kitch, the 41-year-old man behind the mill, sees it as a technique to supply one thing new to town’s saturated bakery scene: “Should you go to the Union Sq. Greenmarket,” he says, “you’ll see 5 various kinds of radicchio” and have the ability to distinguish between a Castelfranco and a Tardivo. “My hope is that this may begin taking place with grain — a recognition of character.”
A wholesale record for eating places and bakers contains flours milled from Pink Fife, Oberkulmer spelt, Hazlet rye and extra. The bakery’s personal loaves, in the meantime, shall be listed in keeping with the grains used. So as a substitute of, say, a “nation loaf,” bread No. 1 shall be Redeemer, Renan, and Glenn wheats, naturally leavened and baked into an extended oval. Redeemer — grown organically by Small Valley Milling in Halifax, Pennsylvania — is considered one of Shaw-Kitch’s favorites. “It’s a workhorse wheat that can be utilized in the whole lot from bread to croissants to pizza,” he says. One other prized grain, Glenn wheat, has a excessive protein content material, produces excessive yields, and is illness resistant. “It’s a mainstay of spring wheat within the Northeast,” Shaw-Kitch suggests. “On the bakery, it would play an essential function in enriched doughs and breads.”
There can even be baguettes, topped focaccias, and an formidable viennoiserie program that’s set to incorporate croissants made with Einkorn (from Hudson Valley Hops & Grains in Columbia County), fortified with Glenn and Renan wheats, and layered with high-fat Cabot butter from Vermont. Japanese methods will make their means right into a rye porridge bread utilizing amazake, a Japanese drink manufactured from fermented rice, as its starter or kind, whereas one hundred pc rye bread has some shio koji (a type of fermented condiment) in it, as properly, however all of the grains are undoubtedly Northeast in origin.
Shaw-Kitch bought his begin in bread in Seattle at Columbia Metropolis Bakery earlier than shifting to Brooklyn to work at Bien Cuit. After a pair years, he took a job in Westchester baking at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. There, he was head baker for 5 years, totally consumed by sourdough starters and seed breeding. However the commute was an excessive amount of, and he began to marvel if he might open one thing nearer to house. What he found had been the numerous the explanation why no person else has thought to open a grain mill within the space: Like distilling, milling is a extremely regulated course of. “The hazard, principally, is that flour is a small particulate,” Shaw-Kitch explains, “if evenly distributed in a closed area, it may be flamable if uncovered to a warmth supply.” (The Pink Hook Grain Terminal isn’t technically a mill, however the state-run grain elevator remains to be relegated to a waterfront area.) “We’ve had fire-safety assessments, taken mitigation, and have an explosion-proof room,” Shaw-Kitch says. He explains that his gristmill will create no extra mud than a bakery does, however Ruwac mud collectors — industrial vacuums, or as he describes them, “droids with hoses” — already patrol the milling room anyway.
That Shaw-Kitch and his spouse Laura Huss — who has helped conceptualize and launch the enterprise — had been in a position to make it occur in any respect required a willingness to navigate loads of purple tape, and a little bit of luck. Monadnock Growth and Building, a prolific developer of market-rate and inexpensive housing, was trying to develop within the Gowanus, finally discovering a house at 300 Huntington, a 136,000-square-foot mixed-use area beneath the Smith–ninth Road subway cease. Brad Lander, town comptroller who was a councilmember on the time, says that town “required one-third of the constructing be for mild trade” as a part of an initiative to “hold Gowanus inventive.” And it was the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Growth Company that satisfied the Division of Metropolis Planning and Division of Buildings to get clearance for the granary to function in a “mild industrial” space in any respect.
Flour mills have traditionally been relegated to “heavy industrial districts” due to their use of incendiary metal rollers. Brooklyn Granary & Mill is as a substitute utilizing two, 40-inch New American Stone Mills from Vermont, situated on the area’s second ground. The 2 mills will function alternately to maintain the temperatures of the stones low. “When flour begins to warmth up within the mill, it loses its aromas,” Shaw-Kitch says. “We would like these aromas to be volatilized within the ovens, not the mills themselves.” Downstairs, there’s a Spanish Salva double-stack steam-injected convection oven and a three-tier German Miwe deck oven, which collectively can bake over 50 loaves of bread at a time. They’ll be displayed, heat, on custom-built bread racks. A stained-glass window, in the meantime, was a present from Shaw-Kitch’s in-laws. It comes from an outdated German bakery in Pennsylvania and reads, merely, “Bakery.”
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