Local Sourdough Bread Baker Incorporates Locally Grown Flour

Making sourdough bread is an old process of making bread using a ‘starter’ of fermented flour and water. The starter is a leavening agent that uses naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria to make baked goods rise. Recently, sourdough bread is finding a new following. Many individuals who are gluten sensitive can eat sourdough bread. In November of 2023, Sheridan Media ran a story about Karis Prusak, Ulm, Wyoming, and her sourdough bread business.

Combining the wheat. Photo thanks to Karis Prusak

Recently, Prusak made some changes in her business, like using some of their own, chemical -free wheat to make flour for the bread. The wheat is grown on their family ranch near Ulm, Wyoming, where she lives with her husband, Matthew and three youngsters.

She said she experimented some, and depending on the loaf, now she uses 20-25% of her own flour so the consumer will get the benefits of more nutrition, with the balance of the flour being commercially milled. Prusak added,

She mills the wheat for flour using an electric stone grinder. She said she uses a stone mill, because it breaks down the wheat kernels differently than a steel burr, and it maintains more nutrition value.

Mill for grinding the wheat

Prusak mentioned that there was a lot of the science behind milling the wheat, as if the wheat gets too hot in the milling process, if loses nutrients.

Her mill can do up to 60 pounds per hour, but she doesn’t mill that much in a day. She talked about the breads that have the highest percentage of home-milled flours.

She makes many different varieties of sourdough, and her breads are available at Cross E Dairy & Freedom Foods store in Sheridan. She bakes about 120 loaves a week, and it sells out rapidly. She recently added a new bread oven, and she can bake up to 12 loaves at a time. The new oven has soap stone, which gives the bread crust a nice crunch.

She has a shifter for the flour, and she will sell a limited supply of the flour to other bakers as well.

Bread Oven

She sends bread to the store on Tuesday and Friday mornings, so on those days it is the freshest. The bread freezes well and can be kept in the refrigerator to extend the life of the loaf. She also does special orders with a couple days’ notice. “You can’t make sourdough in an hour,” she added. Prusak also sells dry starter if anyone wants to make their own starter.

The wheat is stored in a clean, rodent proof granary until needed.

Prusak said she wants to thank her husband, Matthew, her father-in-law Robert Prusak, and neighbor Jim Baumgartner, who helped to build the granary and fill it with wheat.

Prusak also creates natural beef tallow skin creams, which she sells through Freedom Foods and Cottonwood Kitchens. These are available through leulmmarche.com.