SOUTHERN GROUND

A highly curated collection of 80 recipes from twenty acclaimed craft bakeries in the South that showcases superior cold stone-milled flour and highlights the importance of baking with locally farmed ingredients.

Like a chef-driven restaurant, the Carolina Ground Flour Mill in Asheville, North Carolina, is a baker-driven mill. Jennifer Lapidus's intensely flavorful flour, made from grains grown and cold stone-milled in the heart of the South, is transforming bakeries from Louisiana to North Carolina to Florida. Cold stone-milled flour allows bakers to move away from industrial commodity flour and deliver extraordinary taste, texture, and story.

Now, in Southern Ground, Lapidus celebrates the incredible work of bakers all over the South. In Starksville, Mississippi, Troy DeRego's Portuguese biscuits introduce uncommon flavors and textures to this Southern college town. In Columbia, South Carolina, Joe Bowie's insanely popular Cola Bread Club melds his culinary school training with his Southern heritage. The Levee Baking Company in New Orleans provides a unique twist by introducing the flavor of Louisiana blood orange to rye flour. In Stuart, Florida, the Ground Floor Farm serves 100% whole grain naturally leavened bread alongside their house-made cheese and their farm grown-and-made fermented plate of seasonal pickles, kraut, and kimchi to an unlikely audience of Florida retirees.

Serving instruction and insight into how to use and enjoy these flavor-forward flours of geographic distinction, Southern Ground harnesses the wisdom and knowledge that our baking community has gained. With detailed profiles on the top Southern bakers and eighty recipes arranged by grain, this is a love story to Southern baking and a call for the home baker to understand the source and makeup of the most important of ingredients: flour.

Jennifer Lapidus is the founder and principal of Carolina Ground Flour Mill in Asheville, North Carolina. She launched her Natural Bridge Bakery in 1994, where she milled her flours in-house and baked her naturally leavened breads in a wood-fired brick oven. Her bakery was the first of its kind in western North Carolina and was featured in Peter Reinhart's book Whole Grain Breads. Jennifer has also been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Splendid Table, Bon Appétit, Food and Wine, Saveur, Taste of the South, and numerous other local publications. Jennifer sits on the board of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association and is co-organizer of the Asheville Bread Festival.