New York, NY: Ten Speed Press| Random House (April 2021)

Hardback. Decorated Boards.

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 Atlanta, the Little Tart Bakeshop elevates the Georgia peanut with stone-ground whole-grain spelt flour; and in New Orleans, Levee Baking Co. pairs the flavor of Louisiana cane syrup with Southern-grown Wren’s Abruzzi rye.

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.

Robert Raymond is the founder of Sunflower Oven, a collectively-owned and cooperatively-managed bakery in Jackson, MS. Specializing in sourdough breads made with stone-milled Southern grains, Sunflower Oven rests on the foundational principle that nutritious and delicious food is a human right. With roots in that soil, Robert started Sunflower Oven in 2017 with the goals of offering nourishing bread to people in Jackson and helping to build a more just and sustainable food economy. Currently a four-member team, Sunflower Oven is a bakery that practices deep democracy and works towards a kinder and more loving world.