Our Flour

Scotland The Bread grew and sold organic wheat and rye grain and flour, milled in small batches on the UK’s only Zentrofan mill. Grown on Balcaskie Estate in Fife, the grains were chosen for their suitability to Scottish conditions, their biodiversity, their exceptional flavour and their markedly higher vitamin and mineral content than conventional grain.

Finding Lost Wheats

The story began with three wheats common in nineteenth-century Scotland: Rouge d’Ecosse, Golden Drop and Hunter’s. Finding seed for these long-forgotten varieties was no small task. Andy Forbes of Brockwell Bake Association searched gene banks worldwide for tiny samples, often 10 grams or less. Thirteen small packets across the three varieties were germinated by Mike Ambrose at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, and the seedlings were brought to Scotland in March 2013 to be grown on four farms in the Borders, East Lothian, Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. Each harvest was re-sown, mostly at Mungoswells in East Lothian.

In 2014, the James Hutton Institute tested all thirteen samples. The results were twofold: every Rouge d’Ecosse accession was genetically almost identical, despite decades in seed stores from Poland to the USA, and all the old varieties contained more nutritionally important minerals and trace elements than commercial wheat. Encouraged by this initial evidence, we collated all the accessions named Rouge d’Ecosse (and Golden Drop and Hunter’s) into ‘composite’ varieties, capturing, we hoped, a degree of diversity from their varied provenance which might help them thrive again in Scottish soil.

All three were later recognised in Slow Food International’s Ark of Taste.

From Heritage to Landrace

The three wheats were then mixed, grown together and re-sown, with later additions including a high-diversity Danish winter wheat population from Agrologica, to form Balcaskie Landrace. A landrace is a genetically diverse population that adapts to its locality through natural evolution and farmer selection. Testing at the James Hutton Institute showed the landrace well above reference values for key minerals, including manganese (205%), copper (202%), zinc (186%) and magnesium (140%).

Rye followed. ‘Evo’ was an evolutionary spring rye grown from Hans Larsson’s Fulltofta rye from Sweden, and was grown at Balcaskie from 2021. Its diversity helped it withstand pests, disease and weather shocks without pesticides or fungicides, part of the agroecological shift needed to cut farming emissions. It also beat reference values for most minerals, notably calcium (172%) and iron (160%). The 2025 crop was to renamed Balcaskie Evolutionary Rye, with Larsson’s blessing.

Milling for Nutrition

Wholemeal flour is usually coarse, but our cool-running Zentrofan cyclone mill ground whole grain so finely that the flour felt almost as soft as white. It avoided both the heat of stone milling and the nutrient stripping of industrial roller mills, preserving minerals, B vitamins and phenolic compounds found in the bran, the parts white flour largely lacks.

Transparency and the Road Ahead

Testing in 2017 and 2019 showed the flours to be, on average, more nutrient-dense than most, if not all, commercial alternatives. Every bag carried a label summarising its mineral values, something we believe to have been unique, but that we hope other millers would follow so bakers could choose flours with more in them.