Moore Old-Fashioned
Story: Gwen Lawler -Tough
Photos: Brent Van Auken
MOORE'S FLOUR MILL IN REDDING
We’ve come a long way from the days when every family baked its daily
bread. Every town had a flour mill, located on a stream or river to power its millstones. Then in the late 1800s, giant industrial mills took over, producing flour by the ton with electrically powered steel rollers.
Moore’s Flour Mill in Redding is one of a few mills nationwide that still
make flour the old-fashioned way, by grinding wheat kernels between two heavy stones. Bob Moore, who owns the business, and his brother Ken found their first set of grindstones back in 1974 with the help of an 80-year-old lifelong miller in Indiana named Dewey Sheets. Sheets located an 1850-era water-powered mill in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that was falling into disrepair. The grindstones from that mill weighed over a ton each and cost about $1,500 to ship to California.
But those stones put the Moores in business. They opened their mill in 1974 in a 40-by-60-foot Quonset hut on South Market Street in Redding. Some were not optimistic about the future of their floury business. “I remember a banker telling me that this was just a fad,” says Moore. But they continued to grow, and moved to their current location at 1605 Shasta Street in early 1977.
It may have 19th-century parts, but Moore’s Flour Mill is alive
and thriving today. It has 15 employees and operates two shifts at the
plant. Moore’s owns two big trucks that “we load and send out two
to three days a week,” says Bob Moore. “We ship that much again
on other trucks.” One recent day, they were loading 50,000 pounds
of custom-milled flour for a Bay Area client, and another truck with
20,000 pounds of polenta, from milled corn. Unlike giant mills,
Moore’s can customize its grinding process to match the needs of the
customer. The biggest of its 10 silos can hold up to 120,000 pounds
of grain.
Moore’s uses Montana red wheat for its high protein and gluten
content, components essential for making great bread. Their wholewheat
flour has a 15% protein content, while their white flour is
11¾% protein. Compared to flour produced by the big mills, the
stone grinding process allows most of the healthy nutrients of the
wheat kernels to remain in the flour.
Valerie Workman, owner and manager of Redding’s Homecraft
Breads, says they use Moore’s exclusively for all of their products,
because it’s local and “their wheat flour is 100% organic and high
in fiber.” Homecraft makes whole wheat bread and French bread,
as well as four- and 10-grain breads, using Moore’s products. Their
high-quality breads are sandwich staples at Redding restaurants like
Carnegie’s, Tapas and Yaks, as well as the lunch spot right in their
building on Park Marina.
It’s not all about flour at Moore’s. Their store is small, but offers a
treasure trove of healthy food, spices and crunchy granolas. They sell
one- and three-pound bags of cranberry pecan and honey-almond
granola, as well as their own roasted maple pecan granola ($7.49 for
three pounds). There are three kinds of honey, molasses and hard-to-
find sugars like date and dextrose. They have cereals to suit almost
everyone: 4-grain, 10 grain, rolled and quick-cooking oats. People
who are gluten intolerant looking for wheat- flour alternatives will
find potato starch, amaranth and soy flours along with xanthan gum,
which helps gluten-free products to rise. They also sell grains like
quinoa, whole wheat pasta and orzo, a tiny pasta that cooks like rice.
Moore’s is once again running out of space and is planning for a
new park-like mill on 75 acres they own southeast of the Bonnyview
exit off Interstate 5. Bob Moore says they want to build an oldfashioned
water-powered mill on the site and farm the land.
The Moores’ great, great grandfather, Jacob Yost, sold yeast cakes
out of his horse-drawn cart in the 1800s. Today, four generations
later, Moore’s still sells a little bit of yeast and a whole lot of healthy,
stone-ground flour. It turns out that the old ways are still the best for
making a great loaf of bread.
Moore’s Flour Mill
1605 Shasta St., Redding
(530) 241-9245
