Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains

The most accessible and authoritative guide to making delicious homemade bread using flour milled from whole grains—with dozens of recipes! 

“Bread lovers of all skill levels are sure to find themselves returning to this one time and again.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A pioneer of the at-home milling movement, Adam Leonti has written the definitive guide that modernizes this old-world tradition for home cooks and amateur breadheads. With step-by-step photographs and comprehensive instructions to guide you through each technique, plus guidance on all aspects of home milling, including sourcing wheat or flour and choosing the right equipment for your kitchen, Flour Lab is a master class at making better-tasting and more nutritious food.

Thirty-five recipes for bread, pasta, pizza, cake, and pastry serve as a practical base, and Leonti provides dozens of delicious recipes to tailor them to your taste, including:

• Bread: Potato Rolls with Honey Butter; Bagels; Yeasted Ciabatta
• Pasta: Canderli (bread dumplings); Ricotta and Lemon Zest Ravioli; Chicken Liver and Saffron Ragù
• Pizza: Butter, Honey, and Lavender Bianco-style Pizza; Robia, Mortadella, and Arugula Pizza al Taglio; Tomato and Stracciatella Pizza Napoletana
• Pastry, Cookies, and Cakes: Biscotti with almond and grapefruit; Whole Wheat Croissants; Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Embracing freshly milled flour in these recipes—and all the ones you already love to make—will ensure that you never have a stale meal again.

Praise for Flour Lab

“Do you want to make pasta from freshly milled our? Pizza and focaccia? Pastry and bread? The genius of this book is that it expands the possibilities of using freshly milled grains—think flavor, texture, nutrition, uniqueness—across a broad, delicious spectrum. Adam Leonti’s Flour Lab is clearly composed, enthusiastic, and inspiring.”—Ken Forkish, author of Flour Water Salt Yeast

“Flour Lab is not only a beautiful and inspiring book, but it also vividly portrays, through its excellently written narrative and amazing recipes, the personal—yet universal—journey of the artisan soul. Adam Leonti’s own discovery process of the joys of milling and baking with fresh flour is now a lasting and enriching gift to us all.”—Peter Reinhart, author of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Bread Revolution, and Perfect Pan Pizza

Adam Leonti is a Brooklyn-born, Maine-bred chef and baker. He began cooking as a child, preparing meals alongside his Sicilian grandfather and Neapolitan grandmother, and took his first kitchen job at age fourteen. In 2008 he became the chef de cuisine at Vetri, a critically acclaimed Philadelphia institution that won accolades including Philadelphia magazine’s “Best Italian Restaurant,” was a James Beard Foundation Award finalist for “Outstanding Restaurant,” and was included in Travel + Leisure magazine’s “Best Italian Restaurants in the U.S.” In 2012, Adam was named one of Forbes magazine’s prestigious “30 Under 30” professionals in the food and wine industry, as well as an Eater “Young Gun.” In 2015, Adam founded the Brooklyn Bread Lab, a mill and bakery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Outside of the kitchen, Adam finds inspiration studying his voluminous cookbook collection, which comprises more than 1,000 volumes including a favorite, Giuliano Bugialli’s The Fine Art of Italian Cooking. He is a graduate of the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia. His eponymous restaurant, Leonti, opened in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2018.
 
Katie Parla, a New Jersey native, is a Rome-based food and beverage journalist, culinary guide, and educator. She is the author of Food of the Italian South and a Saveur award–winning personal website covering food and travel. Katie has written or contributed to more than twenty-five books about Italy and Turkey. Her travel writing, recipes, and food criticism appear in the New York Times, Food & Wine, Saveur, Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Guardian, Afar, Condé Nast Traveler, Punch, and Eater, and she is the coauthor of the IACP Award–winning cookbook Tasting Rome.