The Producers, a Food Podcast. · A Deep in the Weeds Production

Courtney Young (Woodstock Flour) - the flavour of flour

·27 min·1 clip

Rosella flour can taste 'buttery and floral' enough to make a pizza customer think butter was added.

1. The Producers episode focuses on Courtney Young and Woodstock Flour, with flour treated as a product with flavour, provenance, and a direct link to farming practice. 2. Courtney Young co-runs Woodstock Flour with her husband Ian Young, mills grain in Rutherglen, Victoria, and sells flour direct to bakers across the East Coast. 3. The episode asks what flour is for when it is stone-ground, milled to order, and grown through regenerative organic farming. 4. Courtney says Woodstock Flour started seven or eight years ago as a way to get involved in Ian’s family farm and build a commercial enterprise. 5. Most of the grain still comes from Ian’s parents’ certified organic farm near Berrigan, New South Wales, while Woodstock now also buys from other organic growers in New South Wales and Victoria. 6. Courtney explains that the business is also setting up a regenerative product line with grain from regenerative growers, mostly in Victoria. 7. She describes growing up in Pambula on the south coast of New South Wales, where her father was an oyster farmer and her family also had ties to broad-acre agriculture. 8. Courtney says she and Ian saw regenerative agriculture as a way to do environmental work and community work at the same time. 9. She defines regenerative agriculture as working with natural systems, human health, and animal health, then asks how that can work in annual cropping systems like grain. 10. Courtney points to indigenous land management, pesticide impacts on community and ecosystem health, and the need to respect soils, waterways, and communities. 11. She describes trialling multi-species cover crops, clover planted with wheat, and bio-fertilizers that she compares to a sourdough starter or kimchi for crops. 12. Courtney says reducing tillage matters because it can reduce herbicides, and she describes long pasture phases with animals as one way to restore paddocks. 13. She says farming is emotionally hard because the weather window is narrow, and one season brought little rain early on followed by heavy rain at harvest that caused grain to start germinating. 14. Courtney says that kind of weather damage is heartbreaking and makes farmers wary of getting too emotionally invested in the crop. 15. She says the business is driven by the idea that there is 'so much flavor in flour,' especially when flour is fresh, stone-ground, and milled to order. 16. Courtney uses Rosella wheat as an example, saying a chef’s customer thought butter had been added to pizza dough because the flour tasted buttery and floral. 17. She says protein does not always predict baking performance, because a high-protein wheat last year did not rise as hoped while Spitfire wheat performed amazingly despite lower protein. 18. The conversation stays practical and reflective, with Courtney moving between farm management, milling, customer relationships, and the limits of simple metrics. 19. Listeners interested in regenerative grain, sourdough, and flour quality will get the most from it. 20. Listeners seeking fast recipes or broad food chat may skip it.

As heard by us

Freshly milled flour becomes a story about provenance, taste, and the people behind it.

Courtney Young's story treats flour as something with provenance, not just a baking staple. At Woodstock Flour in Rutherglen, Victoria, she covers stone milling, milling to order, and how freshly milled wheat varieties can taste strikingly different.

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Why you'd press play

You care what flour is made from.

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