Zane Abplanalp and Amy Wincek are the multi-talented entrepreneurs behind Slowbird Bread Company and Leftfield Urban Farm, which you can find at the Jonesborough Farmers Market this upcoming season.
Slowbird Bread was one of the East Tennessee applications to the Business Builder Awards from the Regional Food Business Center, and we will follow their application’s progress with great interest and cheerleading. (The Business Builder Awards are intended for food businesses wanting to expand and scale up. ARCD is the administrator of the program in the eastern half of Tennessee.)
Follow Slowbird’s socials for products sold and pop up bake events.
Field Corn Cookies: Photo Essay Recipe
Zane baked his Cornmeal Cookies for the ARCD 30th anniversary Common Ground party last fall. They are a crunchy and sweet celebration of the complexity of flavors in corn: warm, nutty, sunny, grassy, buttery (or is that all the butter?). Fresh milled corn can show off all those flavors.
The recipe is also a showcase of grinding grains. A photo essay was the right format show the many colors and textures and sounds of Zane baking with freshly ground corn, freshly ground wheat, farm eggs and honey.
Slowbird Bread’s niche as a bakery is using “slow” methods. Natural fermentation and grinding grains fresh brings out flavors and nutrients, and the pure goodness, of the lowly grain.
1. Milling
East Tennessee is teeming with historic mill structures, most of which are long closed but still hold fascination. Think of St. John’s Milling Company in Watauga, the Model Mill in Johnson City, the Old Mills in Pigeon Forge (for a rabbit hole, see this genealogical source).
“This region used to be a bread basket,” says Zane. “Farms grew grains, used them here and sold them. What happened to those varieties?“
Zane uses a table top mill meant for hard and soft grains. “We bake the Field Corn Cookies with an heirloom flint corn variety called Cateto Orange that we get from our friends at Two Stones Farm and Mill [link below] down in Greene County, but any coarse cornmeal will do as long as it’s fresh. I also stone-mill soft wheat from Carolina Ground. In our baking, I steer away from all-purpose commodity flour because it lacks the flavor, aromatic oils, vitamins and minerals, and identity that makes grain so special.”
Regular homebakers may not find it practical to own a mill for home use. But luckily you can buy fresh ground grains. You can buy already ground (milled) grains from the following sources:
- Boone Street Market, Jonesborough store/location
- Red Tail Grain website
- Carolina Ground website
- Two Stones Mill and Farm (Duane Gibson & Lindsey Giglio) in Greeneville is actively growing grains for retail and wholesale. website
For the photo essay, Emily Bidgood used her home garden’s Indian Corn, a kind of flint corn, cultivated by Indigenous Americans for thousands of years.
“Corn always comes out of the mill with different sizes of grain,” explains Zane.
After sifting the corn with a wire mesh sifter, the corn separated into two products — a finer cornmeal, and a coarse meal perfect for grits.
Video: Corn’s first pass through the mill.
Photos from top Left: Corn’s first pass through the mill; Sifting the corn. The coarser meal was then reground to be finer, and sifted; Fresh ground wheat going through the mill; a fine flour on the fingers.
2. Mix
First we ground the corn, sifting it to get a finer meal for the cookies. The coarse meal was reserved for another use, perfect for grits.
The recipe is a standard creaming of the fats and sugars, then adding the dry ingredients.
Photos, top left: Eggs from Emily’s backyard hens; All the ingredients laid out; Honey from Rosey Apiary (Boone Street Market); making a lightly packed 1 cup of fresh ground soft wheat.
Video: Combine the butter, sugars, and honey in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment and cream for 1-2 minutes until fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Beat for another 1-2 minutes. It should be light and airy and slightly tacky.
3. Bake
Zane uses a couple of techniques to accommodate the spreading of these cookies and make them chewier.
He rolls a golf ball sized dough several around times to make a nice compact large ball (50 grams), which ensures they spread in a nice circle evenly as they bake.
He leaves a good bit of room between the cookies on the tray.
When all the dough balls are scaled out, rolled, and on the trays, use a greased lid/deli lid, or your hand, to slightly flatten each dough ball. Sprinkle a bit of sugar and flaky sea salt on each soon to be cookie.
Bake for 8 minutes, rotate, and bake for another 5 or 6 minutes, or until the edges take on a little color and the centers are just about set.
As soon as they come out of the oven, slam the trays on the stove top to flatten the cookies (this will make them super chewy).
Zane finishes with taking a large biscuit cutter to gather into the edges of each cookie to make it more compact and uniform.
Video: Tray TAP!!
Photos, at top Left: making dough balls and leaving plenty of room; cookies nicely puffed mean they are done; beautiful red-orange-yellow Indian Flint Corn flecks in the cookie.
4. Recipe
Zane stresses that fresh ground (milled) flour acts differently in baking, compared to store-bought commodity flour:
“Fresh ground corn and flour is more absorbent of oils and water. If you make this recipe with store flour, you likely have to use less butter otherwise the cookies will spread and ooze out butter.”
Field Corn Sugar Cookies
Yield: 18 cookies
- 1.5 cups cornmeal (corn flour)
- 1.75 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 teas salt
- 1/2 teas baking soda
- 2 sticks (8 oz.) butter room temperature
- 3/4 cup cane sugar
- 1/2 cup brown sugar lightly packed
- 1 heavy/full Tablespoon Honey
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon Vanilla
Preheat oven to 325 F. Combine the butter, sugars, and honey in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment and cream for 1-2 minutes until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and scrape down the sides of the bowl, and mix for 1-2 minutes. Add flour and baking soda and mix just until it comes together and the flour hydrates. Add salt and cornmeal and mix until the dry bits are gone. The dough should be light and fluffy and slightly tackey. It will be sticky but it should come off your hands when you make a ball. If dough is too sticky, add 1 teaspoonful of flour until consistency is workable into balls.
Line baking trays with parchment paper. Scale out chunks of dough the size of a golf ball and roll several times into a nice, even, compact spherical ball. This is essential to the cookie spreading evenly when it bakes. Leave a good bit of room between the cookies on the tray so they don’t spread into each other. I usually fit 5 cookies per 9×13 baking sheet.
When all the dough balls are scaled out, rolled, and on the trays, use your hand or something flat (I use a deli lid) to slightly flatten each dough ball. Sprinkle a bit of sugar and flaky sea salt on each soon to be cookie.
Bake for 8 minutes, rotate, and bake for another 5 or 6 minutes, or until the edges take on a little color and the centers are just about set. They should look underdone in the center.
As soon as they come out of the oven, slam the trays on the stove top to flatten the cookies (this will make them super chewy).
Follow Slowbird’s socials for products sold and pop up bake events. They will be at Jonesborough Farmers Market for the 2025 season.
