Heartland To Home

When you sit down for dinner, chances are your favorite bread or rolls are right there on the table. Food Author James Beard once wrote: "Bread is the most satisfying of all foods." Well, right here in Kansas City there are some people who think creating distinctive breads is the ultimate homage to heartland wheat.

Mark Friend has had a love affair with bread for 30-years. He says, "I fell in love with bread before I learned how I tried. And, I experimented with sour dough and all I had was a bunch of stinky pots of flour and water down in my basement." Following the teachings of some great sourdough bakers, he would later reshape those kitchen disasters into what Friend now calls: Farm To Market.

Mark explains, "We were looking for a name and someone suggested Farm To Market seemed to fit the idea of trying to source our products from our farmers that we would have a relationship with." Farm To Market wants you to know its farmers and the wheat they're growing. Back in the pantry the ingredients have a distinctly Midwestern flavor: Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Kansas.

Thom Leonard with the Farm to Market Bread Company says, "What we're trying to do here is make a closer connection to the farmer and know who the family is that's growing the wheat, that's going into the flour, that's going into the bread that's being sold in the store."

This is a boutique bakery. Hands create the special breads here, not machines. Fresh ingredients are carefully chosen: wheat, oats, raisins, sesame seeds. That’s important to Craig Flaker, who works at the Farm to Market Bread Company. He explains, "There's a big creative outlet that's involved in this. And, that's where the artistic side comes in; the size, the volume, the crumb, the shape."

Specialty products require a special commitment. Farm to Market bakes breads and rolls for 40-grocery stores and 90-restaurants in the Kansas City area. They work 363 days a year taking off only Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Matt Jonas with Hen House Market says, "We get a lot of grief. Because, where's the Ciabatta bread? We'll we bought a hundred loaves and they were gone by one and that's all there is."

Many of the communities here, both in the city and rural areas have populations that came originally from Europe. People of German, Polish, French, Russian and Italian descent, clamor for these hearty breads. Armen Bagiyants gets the hand made dough from farm to market and bakes loaves fresh at his store.

He says, "Customers walk through the front door and they can see how I bake bread. How I put it in the oven and how I take from the oven hot, they want their bread hot."

Farm To Market completes a theme at the Hen House supermarket chain: "buy fresh, buy local." Even to produce that carries the face and name of the farmer that grew it. Matt says, "The average item in the supermarket travels about 15-hundred miles to get here and these items are all within 200-miles. They have a sense that it's fresher, that it's better for them."

But Farm To Market is going even further: testing different ways to mill the flour, giving their breads different textures. It's easy to see differences in the handling characteristics of dough. And that difference has led them to seek out farmers interested in milling their own grain. Thom says, "There's a big enough market now in the US for artisan style bread that there needs to be a flour that's suited for this too." But bread is sometimes a fickle partner.

Those who work closely with these ingredients from the heartland will tell you this dough is a "living" organism, an organism that lets them know, everyday, how well they're doing their job. Matt says, "When bread comes out of the oven, you know it has this brown glow to it, it's hot coming out of the oven. It's incredible. It makes you feel proud."