While most Buffalonians are fast asleep, Stephen Horton of Miller’s Thumb Bakery begins milling fresh flour at 3:30 a.m. every morning. For the next two hours, he carefully feeds beadlike kernels of New York State–grown Glenn and Warthog wheat from 50-pound bags into the bakery’s custom-made stone mill as flour sprays in powdery sheets from the opposite side, like a snowblower.
Freshly milled flour is part of Buffalo’s legacy. For a century, the city was a hub of America’s grain trade, as well as its flour milling and bread manufacturing. Horton’s flour comprises the base of his bagels, buns, sweet rolls—and the bakery’s Wonderful Loaf, an homage to Wonder Bread that Horton and his business and life partner, Jill Colella, conceived as a flagship product when they opened Miller’s Thumb in 2022.
Long before Buffalo was celebrated for its eponymous hot wings and roast beef on a kummelweck roll, the city’s food economy centered around grain. But in the latter half of the 20th century, as the city’s once-flourishing shipping industry slowly deteriorated, Buffalo’s legacy as a bread-baking and milling town became a forgotten footnote. Among the remnants of the city’s golden age are the towering rows of abandoned grain elevators whose hollowed-out carcasses still inhabit the shores of the Buffalo River, a haunting reminder of the city’s glorious agrarian past.
Horton’s freshly milled flour comprises the base of the bakery’s Wonderful Loaf, an homage to Wonder Bread.
Colella is a proud Buffalo native and the creative force behind Wonderful Loaf. She moved back home from Minneapolis with Horton in 2019 after the two began devising a plan for a bakery there. “I was always jealous of Wonder Bread when I was kid,” she says. “My mom would buy this other brand, Sunbeam, which was like Hydrox cookies instead of Oreos for me.” Colella saw a need in the community for an affordable everyday sandwich bread, like the recognizable brands of her youth. “When Dad went to the store, he would buy the name brand and we would use the leftover Wonder Bread bags to line our snow boots,” she adds.
Colella and Horton were keenly aware that a scant six miles from their bakery, an abandoned Wonder Bread factory, active from 1925 to 2004, still stood, derelict from two decades of neglect. In its heyday, the facility showcased the innovative automated manufacturing methods of Wonder Bread, one of the first commercial breads to be sold pre-sliced.
With Wonderful Loaf, Colella saw an opportunity to honor Buffalo’s bread-baking legacy while eschewing the highly processed ingredients that strip industrial breads of their nutritional value and flavor. “If Wonder Bread was supposed to be this scientific miracle, then we felt like we could make it even more wonderful by using better flour, better methods, and cleaner ingredients,” Colella says.
An Abandoned Factory With a Glorious Past
From a distance, it’s difficult to make out the two words that once stood atop the roof of the abandoned five-story factory building on Fougeron Street, bounded by Barthel and Urban streets on Buffalo’s industrial east side. Despite the missing characters, if you stare long enough at the signage, you can deduce that it once read “WONDER BREAD” in giant block lettering.
Aside from the 56-acre Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, originally called The Parade and designed in 1874 by Fredrick Law Olmsted of Central Park fame, there isn’t much within a five-block radius of the moribund factory. Before the plant unceremoniously closed 20 years ago, the yeasty aroma of freshly baked Wonder Bread permeated the neighborhood; in its heyday, the factory could produce 100,000 loaves, 50,000 cakes, and 20,000 rolls every day. Now, the windows along the perimeter of the blond brick building, framed by Roman-inspired arches, are mostly all blown out and boarded up, and the interior of the factory is ransacked and riddled with graffiti.
“The building is a classic example of a scientific and sanitary bakery inspired by the Pure Foods movement in the early 20th century,” says Chris Hawley, a local urbanist and preservationist who authored the application to award the Wonder Bread Factory local landmark status, which was approved in 2018. “These structures were an outgrowth of progressivism and the notion that science can join hands with agriculture to produce healthier foods, before we learned better that some of these foods weren’t so healthy after all.”
Wonder Bread didn’t originate in Buffalo. The product was first manufactured by the Taggart Baking Company in Indianapolis in 1921. It wasn’t until the Buffalo-based Continental Baking Company (formerly Ward & Ward Incorporated), which built the Fougeron Street facility in 1914, acquired Taggart in 1925 that it began baking Wonder Bread in Buffalo. By 1928, after a series of aggressive acquisitions, the Continental Baking Company became the largest commercial baking operation in the United States.
According to The New York Times, Continental Baking Company’s profits in 1950 neared record highs with sales of more than $150 million, primarily fueled by the popularity of Wonder Bread and Hostess baked goods. Wonder Bread has since had multiple owners, and although it’s no longer the household staple it once was, the brand lives on, generating half a billion in sales in 2022 for its current owner, Flowers Foods.
“Wonder Bread is an iconic American product,” says Hawley, stressing the importance of preserving the deteriorating building. “It’s as important as Coca-Cola or M&M’s in American food history. It helps tell the story of America in the 20th century.”
‘Like the Icon but Better’
Before Miller’s Thumb Bakery opened in 2022, Horton spent months researching his recipe for Wonderful Loaf, creating over a dozen failed prototypes before arriving at the finished product. Working with freshly milled flour can create challenges to achieving a consistent bake. “The flavor profiles are more unique and complex than commercially created flour,” says Horton, “but there are also more natural oils present in freshly milled flours that interfere with gluten structure, and using them doesn’t allow for the same volume.” The biggest challenge was replicating Wonder Bread’s signature squishiness.
To increase volume, Horton adds 20 percent King Arthur Sir Galahad flour to the freshly milled flour base as well as a small amount of fava-bean flour from Bob’s Red Mill as an “improver” to get even more lift. Horton explains that natural enzymes in fava-bean flour create peroxide, which reinforces gluten structure and builds volume in the rise. Using commercial yeast further encourages leavening. To this mix, Horton adds naturally fermented levain (sourdough starter), eggs, and a hint of butter to achieve a more tender crumb and more flavorful crust.
