Posts Tagged ‘Aurora Farms’

• Red Hen Digs Deep to Go Local

  Date: 11.06.2009 | Category: Producer Beat | Response: 0

  Red Hen Baking Company, now located at the historic Camp Meade in Middlesex, VT, has been making celebrated organic, hearth-baked artisan loaves for the past decade.

  “We’ve been organic from Day One,” says Red Hen Baking owner Randy George. “And local ingredients have always factored into our products. Their use has increased as availability has.”

  But when it comes to producing a good, chewy loaf, it’s a nearly insurmountable challenge for New England bakers to go local. The best wheat for bread–hard red winter wheat–grows on the Great Plains and is then trucked to flour mills along the Mississippi, ten times the distance prescribed by most localvores.

  But Randy George doesn’t let geography get in the way of producing a truly local Red Hen loaf. He’d heard that the Champlain Valley had been a top wheat producer in the 1850s. Not coincidentally, the premier wheat breeder at the time was one Cyrus Guernsey Pringle, a Charlotte, VT, resident.

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