Kim Boyce‘s lovely Bakeshop in Portland and decide to bake her Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies. I can feel you rolling your eyes. You don’t understand, I’m often not a cookie fan. They can be too sweet. But the deep flavor wheat germ lends to the cookie changes everything. The first time I made this recipe from Kim’s James Beard award winning book Good to the Grain I wanted to sing an aria to her genius. Really it was the first chocolate chip cookie I couldn’t stop eating. Using whole wheat flour tempers the sweetness of the sugar and chocolate which for me is a good thing.
But this time around I was determined to do justice to the very special flour I was using. This was whole wheat flour “milled” by producer Gillian (a veteran of many spinning classes) and me (a veteran of the two wheeler) laboring on a exercycle hacked to turn a grain mill. It was a blast, cycling away under a marquee tent on the grounds of an apple orchard at the Washington State University Mt. Vernon Research Center and the result was silky, super fine whole meal flour. Watch us spinning for flour below and keep scrolling for my interview with founder of the grain mill Jack Jenkins.