Summer Camp for Bakers at an Oregon Flour Mill | Portland Monthly

ByAdrian J. S. HaleJune 10, 2024Published in the Summer 2024 issue ofPortland Monthly

Image: courtesy camas country mill

Early one summer morning, I dropped my kids off at day camp in Portland and drove the couple of hours to a one-room schoolhouse on the edge of Junction City, to a camp of my own.

As I pulled up, the sun was just far enough over the horizon to make the dew glisten. Sunflowers swayed in the field, and baskets of bread already graced long tables. Campers were ambling up from tents scattering the property, ready for some pastries prepared for them, for a change, rather than by them.

More than 45 bakers had gathered on this day in 2019 for the first-ever Camp Camas, an event packed with demos, field walks, and classes led by many of the best in a growing grain revival. And it felt like a revival of sorts, people gathering under big tents in a field outside a schoolhouse to tout the virtues of all things local grain. The lessons learned at this now-regular happening are part of a wider regenerative food movement that is helping to shape the way America thinks about great bread.

Over the years, bags of Camas flour have become a common sight piled high in bakeries and pizza joints around town. An avid home baker and food writer, I first heard about Camas Country Mill back in 2011—a new flour mill that was trying to change the game.

Owner Tom Hunton is a second-generation farmer. He specialized in growing grass seed until 2008. His family’s fields had once been diverse with livestock and cover crops, but by the time the recession hit, they mostly focused on grass seed for big-box stores. As the economy plunged, Hunton worried about his family, but also about his community. He wanted to secure a regional food supply that didn’t rely so heavily on the commodity market. Since he was already a grass seed grower, grains were a great choice.

He realized quickly that there was a missing link between his crops and the baking public. “Unless I could get the grain into its final form, it wouldn’t be as valuable for the community,” he recalls. “The mill became the integral infrastructure to keep our grains here in our market.”

Image: Adrian J. S. Hale

Lane County helped Hunton and his wife, Sue, open Camas Country Mill, the first grist mill of its kind in the Willamette Valley in more than eight decades. Its goal—to source grains from its own region—was revolutionary in our tangled modern food system.

After he got the mill up and running, his mother, who just turned 100, shared a picture from their family archives. A relative in a covered wagon behind a team of mules, holds two-foot-long loaves of black bread. Apparently, his recent ancestors had owned a bakery back in Denmark, the same area from where his current mills come.

But the Huntons’ efforts to change our food system required bakers who knew how to work with freshly milled whole-grain flour, rather than the commodity stuff. The Camp Camas I attended in 2019 became the first of a semiannual, invite-only symposium that empowers more local businesses to participate in this change.

Image: courtesy camas country mill

Most of Camp Camas happens around that white one-room schoolhouse, built in 1881. The Huntons moved it a half mile to their property to save it from demolition. Now, sitting amongst amber waves of grain and cover-crop sunflowers, it’s become a symbol of the Huntons’ wider work: Camas Country Mill supplies pallets of whole-wheat flour to at least 10 school districts.

This summer, the mill will again host local bakers to discuss such topics as getting flour from field to loaf, distilling regenerative spirits, and using grains that add to the health of the soil. The year I went, Dr. Andrew Ross, an Oregon State University cereal scientist and a national expert on the health of grain foods, held a rollicking forum teaching bakers how to read a lab reporting analysis and farinograph.

“One of the values of getting together,” says Dillon DeBauche of Little t Baker in Southeast Portland, “is sharing knowledge about how to make better food available.”

DeBauche was head baker at Camas Country Mill’s test bakery during the first Camp Camas. He’s now come full circle, recently taking over as owner of Little t, where he cut his teeth in his early baking years. He’s converting all the recipes to regional flour, using ideas percolated in his time at the mill and shared at Camp Camas.

The places where DeBauche worked previously bought grains like spelt and rye from a broker in Montana, but there was no transparency on sourcing; grains could even come from overseas. “Switching to Camas spelt flour was like night and day,” he says. “It had an amazing flavor, and it smelled better. The structure of the dough was even nicer.”

Image: courtesy camas country mill

Lane Selman, founder of Culinary Breeding Network, also attended camp that first year. Selman’s organization brings plant breeders and chefs together in culinary exploration. She came with Brigid Meints, who heads a barley project. They met some attendees from Burgerville and started to bounce ideas off of one another. Within the year, the Vancouver, Washington–based chain put a local barley and radicchio salad on its winter menu. “When you’re in a place together like that,” says Selman, “more ideas come out.”

Burgerville was at Camp Camas promoting its new-at-the-time No. 6 burger. Hyperlocal even for the chain known for local fast food, the burger has a patty from Eastern Oregon’s Carman Ranch and a bun that uses Camas-milled whole-wheat Edison flour, created by a retired local wheat breeder to suit the Pacific Northwest.

The locality of bread is all but invisible, and yet it can have a huge impact on a food community. A finished loaf relies on everyone from cereal scientists to seed breeders to farmers to millers. Getting them all together to share ideas feels like the best way to make progress while still honoring this ancient craft.

“They are an amazingly collaborative group,” says Hunton. “But when you’re busy running your bakery, you don’t have much of a chance to do that.”

That first year, Mel Darbyshire, head baker at Grand Central, spoke about bakeries’ power to effect change in the food system. Bakers from influential institutions like Tartine in San Francisco and King Arthur in Vermont were in the audience, ready to learn from, and collaborate with, Oregon’s pizza, pasta, and whiskey makers.

Although Camp Camas is invitation-only, the bakery alongside the schoolhouse is open to the public (though it’s closed during camp itself), serving cinnamon rolls, turnovers, and a rotating list of daily bread specialties. Visitors can also buy flour and other local products. Consider it your own bakery day camp. And if you look around next time you’re ordering a muffin at your favorite local bakery, you might catch a glimpse of Camp Camas spirit piled high in bags of flour.