Whereas most Buffalonians are quick asleep, Stephen Horton of Miller’s Thumb Bakery begins milling recent flour at 3:30 a.m. each morning. For the subsequent two hours, he fastidiously feeds beadlike kernels of New York State–grown Glenn and Warthog wheat from 50-pound luggage into the bakery’s custom-made stone mill as flour sprays in powdery sheets from the alternative aspect, like a snowblower.
Freshly milled flour is a part of Buffalo’s legacy. For a century, town was a hub of America’s grain commerce, in addition to its flour milling and bread manufacturing. Horton’s flour contains the bottom of his bagels, buns, candy rolls—and the bakery’s Great Loaf, an homage to Marvel Bread that Horton and his enterprise and life companion, Jill Colella, conceived as a flagship product after they opened Miller’s Thumb in 2022.
Lengthy earlier than Buffalo was celebrated for its eponymous sizzling wings and roast beef on a kummelweck roll, town’s meals economic system centered round grain. However within the latter half of the twentieth century, as town’s once-flourishing delivery business slowly deteriorated, Buffalo’s legacy as a bread-baking and milling city turned a forgotten footnote. Among the many remnants of town’s golden age are the towering rows of deserted grain elevators whose hollowed-out carcasses nonetheless inhabit the shores of the Buffalo River, a haunting reminder of town’s wonderful agrarian previous.
Horton’s freshly milled flour contains the bottom of the bakery’s Great Loaf, an homage to Marvel Bread.
Colella is a proud Buffalo native and the inventive pressure behind Great Loaf. She moved again dwelling from Minneapolis with Horton in 2019 after the 2 started devising a plan for a bakery there. “I used to be all the time jealous of Marvel Bread after I was child,” she says. “My mother would purchase this different model, Sunbeam, which was like Hydrox cookies as a substitute of Oreos for me.” Colella noticed a necessity locally for an reasonably priced on a regular basis sandwich bread, just like the recognizable manufacturers of her youth. “When Dad went to the shop, he would purchase the identify model and we’d use the leftover Marvel Bread luggage to line our snow boots,” she provides.
Colella and Horton had been keenly conscious {that a} scant six miles from their bakery, an deserted Marvel Bread manufacturing unit, energetic from 1925 to 2004, nonetheless stood, derelict from twenty years of neglect. In its heyday, the ability showcased the modern automated manufacturing strategies of Marvel Bread, one of many first business breads to be offered pre-sliced.
With Great Loaf, Colella noticed a possibility to honor Buffalo’s bread-baking legacy whereas eschewing the extremely processed elements that strip industrial breads of their dietary worth and taste. “If Marvel Bread was purported to be this scientific miracle, then we felt like we might make it much more fantastic through the use of higher flour, higher strategies, and cleaner elements,” Colella says.
An Deserted Manufacturing unit With a Superb Previous
From a distance, it’s troublesome to make out the 2 phrases that when stood atop the roof of the deserted five-story manufacturing unit constructing on Fougeron Road, bounded by Barthel and City streets on Buffalo’s industrial east aspect. Regardless of the lacking characters, when you stare lengthy sufficient on the signage, you’ll be able to deduce that it as soon as learn “WONDER BREAD” in large block lettering.
The now-abandoned Marvel Bread manufacturing unit in Buffalo was in-built 1914. (Picture credit score: Emily Jarnot)
Except for the 56-acre Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, initially referred to as The Parade and designed in 1874 by Fredrick Regulation Olmsted of Central Park fame, there isn’t a lot inside a five-block radius of the moribund manufacturing unit. Earlier than the plant unceremoniously closed 20 years in the past, the yeasty aroma of freshly baked Marvel Bread permeated the neighborhood; in its heyday, the manufacturing unit might produce 100,000 loaves, 50,000 muffins, and 20,000 rolls day-after-day. Now, the home windows alongside the perimeter of the blond brick constructing, framed by Roman-inspired arches, are largely all blown out and boarded up, and the inside of the manufacturing unit is ransacked and riddled with graffiti.
“The constructing is a traditional instance of a scientific and sanitary bakery impressed by the Pure Foods movement within the early twentieth century,” says Chris Hawley, a neighborhood urbanist and preservationist who authored the appliance to award the Marvel Bread Manufacturing unit native landmark standing, which was authorised in 2018. “These buildings had been an outgrowth of progressivism and the notion that science can be part of palms with agriculture to provide more healthy meals, earlier than we discovered higher that a few of these meals weren’t so wholesome in spite of everything.”
Marvel Bread didn’t originate in Buffalo. The product was first manufactured by the Taggart Baking Firm in Indianapolis in 1921. It wasn’t till the Buffalo-based Continental Baking Firm (previously Ward & Ward Included), which constructed the Fougeron Road facility in 1914, acquired Taggart in 1925 that it started baking Marvel Bread in Buffalo. By 1928, after a sequence of aggressive acquisitions, the Continental Baking Firm turned the most important business baking operation in the US.
In accordance with The New York Times, Continental Baking Firm’s income in 1950 neared report highs with gross sales of greater than $150 million, primarily fueled by the recognition of Marvel Bread and Hostess baked items. Marvel Bread has since had a number of house owners, and though it’s now not the family staple it as soon as was, the model lives on, producing half a billion in gross sales in 2022 for its present proprietor, Flowers Foods.
“Marvel Bread is an iconic American product,” says Hawley, stressing the significance of preserving the deteriorating constructing. “It’s as vital as Coca-Cola or M&M’s in American meals historical past. It helps inform the story of America within the twentieth century.”
‘Just like the Icon however Higher’
Earlier than Miller’s Thumb Bakery opened in 2022, Horton spent months researching his recipe for Great Loaf, creating over a dozen failed prototypes earlier than arriving on the completed product. Working with freshly milled flour can create challenges to reaching a constant bake. “The flavour profiles are extra distinctive and complicated than commercially created flour,” says Horton, “however there are additionally extra pure oils current in freshly milled flours that intervene with gluten construction, and utilizing them doesn’t enable for a similar quantity.” The largest problem was replicating Marvel Bread’s signature squishiness.
To extend quantity, Horton provides 20 % King Arthur Sir Galahad flour to the freshly milled flour base in addition to a small quantity of fava-bean flour from Bob’s Crimson Mill as an “improver” to get much more carry. Horton explains that pure enzymes in fava-bean flour create peroxide, which reinforces gluten construction and builds quantity within the rise. Utilizing business yeast additional encourages leavening. To this combine, Horton provides naturally fermented levain (sourdough starter), eggs, and a touch of butter to realize a extra tender crumb and extra flavorful crust.
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