OUR
BREAD
Our Ingredients
A word about our ingredients
The world’s best whole wheat bread starts with the world’s best wheat, grown on the high plains of north-central Montana. Each morning we stone-grind this wheat into fresh whole wheat flour… what’s so great about that? Find out below!
The best whole wheat bread doesn’t need a lot of ingredients… in fact the less, the better! We use just FIVE pure and simple ingredients: fresh stone-ground flour, filtered Salem water (rated #1 highest-quality municipal water in the USA!), our own special clover-blend honey, fresh yeast, and sea salt… that’s it!
What we don’t use in our bread is just as important: we never use additives, preservatives, chemicals, dough conditioners, or anything else that doesn’t belong in your food. Most of our breads are baked without oils of any kind. You can count on the highest quality, all-natural ingredients in all of our products!
Fresh Milled!
Ever since the original Great Harvest opened in 1976, our breads have been made with freshly-ground 100% whole-grain flour. Why?
It tastes better!
Just as a cup of coffee tastes its fullest and best when its coffee beans are freshly ground, our bread tastes exceptionally fresh because we grind our own wheat kernels every day. Our freshly ground whole wheat flour is never more than 48 hours old.
It makes generous-sized loaves with lasting freshness.
Other bakeries use dough conditioners or chemicals to boost loaf volume, making it airy. We just use fresh wheat, carefully and stringently selected from the arid high plains of America's best wheat-growing regions. That's it. Freshly ground whole wheat—plus our proprietary recipes and baking process—enables most Great Harvest Breads to remain fresh 7-10 days without using any preservatives.
It's better for you.
Simply adding fresh ground whole wheat to your diets is an easy and delicious way to load up on the critical fiber, vitamin E, vitamin B, zinc and potassium your body needs. But there's more... when a kernel of wheat is milled, all parts of the flour start to oxidize as they're exposed to air—the germ (which is nutrient-rich and contains free fatty acids) is particularly vulnerable to this oxidation. Most of us don't know when the flour in a store-bought loaf was ground, but at Great Harvest you can trust that the flour is the freshest it can be, with vital nutrients at their best.
We use the whole grain.
Whole wheat kernels are poured into one end of our mill and come out the other end at 100% whole wheat flour. There is absolutely no separation of flour components—nothing added or taken out—just pure fresh flour from the whole grain.Click here for a printable flyer about Whole Grains.
Why stone milling is best.
The choice we modern millers face: whether to use an old-fashioned stone mill, or a modern steel mill. Modern steel blade mills are designed to process the grain more quickly, but in the process, the blades heat up. This heat transfers to the wheat during this fragile state, which is damaging to its nutritional value. Old-fashioned “stone” milling is a slower and, therefore, cooler process, thus preserving more nutritional value!
