He began sourcing them from around the state last summer. Finally in 2016, he won a grant from the Austin Food & Wine Alliance to purchase a hammer mill to grind mesquite pods. And every time he bought mesquite flour, he wondered why Texas didn't produce its own. Later, while developing his own business, Miche Bread, he decided to focus on heritage grains. The first time he baked with it, mixing it with wheat flour, Gyawali says, "It really smelled like baking spices, almost like I'd made a spiced holiday bread." The people he worked with "went crazy for it." "I'd never heard about that before, but I'd heard of mesquite, and mesquite sounds like Texas, so that kind of took me down a rabbit hole." He managed to find a box of mesquite flour, but was surprised to see it was imported from Peru. On the organization's page listing foods in danger of extinction, he found mesquite pod flour. Slow Food Austin challenged him to make a bread with a mystery ingredient. Gyawali first came across mesquite when he was working at the bakery and bar Easy Tiger. He says that losing a sense of having a hometown early on taught him to "seek out what's unique about a place and how I can identify with that, and usually it's through food." A neuroscientist-turned-baker who immigrated from Nepal to Chicago as a child, he moved to Austin seven years ago. Gyawali was drawn to that sweet bean, too. Mesquite flour stirred into butter has a unique sweet flavor, and is especially good on homemade bread.
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