Steve DeWitt, owner of Willow Creek Farms Pantry, purchased a hand-crafted stone mill made in Vermont and had it shipped to Braman, Oklahoma, where it is now being used to grind grain sorghum to make gluten-free flours. (All photos by Candace Krebs.)
In north-central Oklahoma, where the landscape is a patchwork of diverse crops, the state now has its first stone-milling and packaging operation dedicated solely to gluten-free grains.
“I wanted to take something we can grow and turn it into something consumers can buy,” explained Steve DeWitt, owner of Willow Creek Farms Pantry in Braman. “I wanted to work with grain sorghum because I like it as a crop. It works well in our crop rotations here.”
Bakery owner Nicole Hanson can testify to the high demand for gluten-free options. She opened Sweet Friends Bakery in Edmond three and a half years ago and now devotes two-thirds of her bakery case to gluten-free items, with many customers choosing to eat wheat-free regardless of whether they have gluten sensitivities.
“Our whole MO here is clean ingredients. Everything is dye-free and seed oil-free,” she said.
While the term gluten-free conjures a “health halo” for many, most gluten-free flours are made from mass-produced commodity grains and require alternative binding agents such as Xanthan gum to mimic the fluffy, stretchy texture naturally produced by the protein in wheat.
Hanson started out using a blend of white and brown rice for her gluten-free all-purpose flour. Although it was organic, she had no personal connection to the source. When she found out a farm in Oklahoma was offering a fresh-milled alternative, she immediately reached out about setting up a wholesale account.
She credits the discovery of Willow Creek Farms to Conscious Community Co-op in Edmond, a local food store where she shops with her family.
“We love to support Oklahoma businesses,” Hanson said. “There’s just something special about knowing the hands that grow it and mill it and bring it to us.”
Flour milled from sorghum berries differs in color, taste, and texture compared to traditional wheat flour. The United Sorghum Checkoff offers detailed advice on how to cook and bake with sorghum at SorghumCheckoff.com/consumers/tips-for-cooking.
Gaining Ground
Sorghum’s status as a gluten-free grain is making it increasingly popular as a food ingredient, even though it’s most commonly fed to livestock. The fiber, minerals, antioxidants, and lower-glycemic starch also make it attractive. With Americans increasing their intake of plant protein and seeking healthier snack options, national brands like Cob Foods have sprung up, promoting “corn-free” popcorn and tortilla chips made with sorghum instead.
DeWitt wanted to do his own product development, but on a smaller, more localized scale. Even though no one in his family is on a gluten-free diet, he saw it as a market niche Oklahoma growers could fill.
Currently, he’s growing standard food-grade white sorghum and a cream-colored variety with 50 percent higher protein content. He’s also interested in black sorghum, which has a deep purplish hull loaded with ten times more antioxidants than blueberries. When separated off, the bitter bran is sometimes used in pharmaceutical applications.
The seed for food-grade sorghum is produced in the Texas Panhandle and available through regional suppliers. A small royalty is associated with specialty traits like high protein.
Following harvest in the fall, the grain goes directly from the field to a newly renovated 1,200-square-foot milling and packaging facility in downtown Braman dedicated exclusively to gluten-free products. The building, originally built in the 1950s, once housed an auto repair and car wash and a snack grill before DeWitt remodeled it into a licensed commercial kitchen.
He received two federal grants to help offset the cost to equip it, one from USDA’s Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program, administered by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, and another from the Heartland Food Business Coalition.
Inside a garage bay behind two large totes of stored grain sits a 26-inch round stone mill representing the highest level of American craftsmanship. Cut by hand from Vermont granite at New American Stone Mills in New England, it was purchased second-hand for around $15,000 and shipped to Oklahoma on a pallet inside a heavy wooden crate.
Grain is poured into the hopper on top and comes out as whole-ground flour or gets diverted through a chute into an adjacent sifter box. The bran that gets sifted off is packaged and marketed as a separate ingredient for use in breads or granola. The freshly milled flour is packaged in 24-oz. bags for distribution to stores or available for purchase online at WillowCreekFarmsPantry.com.
Additional products in development at Willow Creek Farms include a coarse-ground breakfast cereal similar to Cream of Wheat, a pancake mix, and dried pasta.
For making the pasta, the kitchen is equipped with a large mixer and two stainless steel appliances: a box-shaped extrusion machine and an upright dryer, both made by Italian manufacturer Pastabiz. The extruder comes with interchangeable bronze dies, which create different shapes and give the finished product a traditional rustic texture.
While the all-purpose sorghum flour is made with tapioca and potato starch, the pasta dough is a combination of sifted flour blended with tapioca starch and psyllium husk to lend it a chewier texture.
DeWitt’s daughter-in-law Tori, wife of oldest son Dane, helps run the kitchen. She assisted in developing one of their first products, a heritage wheat-based pancake-and-waffle mix that has since been sold to Sidwell Distribution in Enid to allow Willow Creek to focus exclusively on gluten-free products.
Tori’s big passion is horses; she trains and shows Morgans with Steve’s wife Janie. But baking is a close second. Growing up on a diversified farm northeast of Newkirk, Oklahoma, she learned scratch-cooking from her mother and grandmother.
“I got my passion from them,” she recalled. “My grandmother was always known for her pies, and I picked up some tips and tricks from her.”
Her only previous knowledge of gluten-free came from a family friend with celiac disease.
Adapting recipes to make them gluten-free takes experimentation. She compared it to piecing together a puzzle. “With sorghum, there’s definitely a difference in feel, texture, and color,” she said. “You can detect those differences even after it’s baked.”
Figuring out the right ingredients and ratios for the pasta was a fun challenge, she said, with each batch taking 12 to 14 hours to dry.
“It’s rewarding to develop something that can help someone else but isn’t being locally grown and milled in most places,” she said.
Tori DeWitt stands next to the Italian extrusion machine used for making gluten-free pasta from freshly ground sorghum flour at Willow Creek Farms Pantry. Developing the recipe was a fun challenge, she says.
Care in Every bag
Customers might be surprised to learn that most of the cost of Willow Creek products isn’t in the raw ingredients, it’s in the packaging, labels, and transportation to get it to stores. As farmers deal with rising input costs and ongoing marketing uncertainty, they are looking for ways to capture as much value as they can from every bushel of grain produced.
Diversification of crops and markets is essential to the economic survival of most small farms. DeWitt plans to try growing other gluten-free grains, including millet and mung beans.
“What I’m really most excited about is getting beyond flour and into products further up the value chain,” he said.
His daughter-in-law is equally enthusiastic about expanding their business.
“There’s pride in the fact that we package every bag of flour by hand,” she said. “We’re proud of all the work and care that goes into what we do. Hopefully we can keep this going so that down the road my own daughter and son can help with farming the crops and providing food for future generations.”
Dining and Cooking