Tips I’ve Learned Baking with Fresh Milled Flour

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Milling my own grains has been quite the fascinating learning journey, but also a wild one figuring out how to make existing family recipes and recipes I enjoy that call for store-bought flour work with freshly milled flour.  It wasn’t as simple as replacing all-purpose flour with the fresh milled.  There a bit of a change in measurement and how you treat the dough or batter.  What I have learned though is fresh milled is far superior in flavor, texture, and remaining essential nutrients that the learning curve has been oh so worth it!  One of my favorite parts is that wheat berries can be stored basically indefinitely with little preparation to get them there.  A 5 pound bucket fitted with a gamma lid will hold about 35 pounds of wheat berries.  If you want to learn more about long term food storage and how to get started, with a specific section I’ve included on wheat berries, check out my blog post!  

It’s amazing how adulterated the store bought flours, even organic whole grain flours, are when you start milling your own.  It’s basically just nutrition-less dust… even whole-grain flour, sprouted grain flour, and organic.  Look into it.  The nutritional value alone is mind blowing.  And before you go all WE DON’T NEED BREAD…. that’s your opinion, I actually do and it’s biblical.  I’m eating bread.

I own a grain mill that is an initial investment in price that was gifted to me by my very generous Mother, but with how much I use it, it has paid for itself had I purchased it.  I started out with a cheap hand crank grinder that worked just fine but was more work and elbow grease than just flipping a button on and dumping in the wheat berries and in hindsight after using my electric mill, it didn’t grind very nicely either.  I still have it in case of power outages and am not afraid of a little work.  I get a lot of comments on social media about “must be nice to be rich” or “I can’t afford that” to which I say… you don’t know my finances, you don’t need fancy equipment, and you don’t need to be a victim of your circumstances.  

If you want to do it, you will make it happen.  Much like going on a vacation, you save up so you can make it happen.  I don’t go on vacation, so the grain mill would be that for me.  And if you’re super frugal, you can use two bricks or rocks and make your flour like a caveman.  Where there’s a will, there’s a way.  And if you don’t want to mill your own flour, that’s fine, I just don’t wanna hear excuses :D

My Favorite Grain Mill

I use a WonderMill that was gifted to me and I’ve had it for a bit over a year now.  I can resoundingly say I am thrilled with the quality, ease of cleaning, and would wholeheartedly spend my own money to purchase one again if I had to.  It has been a nice addition to my homesteader arsenal in my quest to make the most nutritional food for my family.  That being said, it’s the only mill I have much experience with.  I’ve been around and seen a few of the other brands in use and have been told they work well, but I will never recommend something I’m not personally using and love.  I’m also not getting paid to say any of this.

Wheat Berries

I purchase my wheat berries from some local Amish bulk food stores and we also have a farm that sells them semi-close to where I live; under a 2 hour drive from home which is worth it to go snag a whole bunch of wheat berries.  That’s where I get mine until I can swindle my husband into planting a couple acres of my own wheat and building me my own grain bin…. lofty goals. You won’t find me repping anywhere else as I don’t have experience with it.  Now, let’s go through which types of wheat I store and what do I use it for real quick before I start into the meat of what I’ve learned so far!

Hard White Wheat

This is the variety I use the most.  Hard white wheat makes the most delicious bread stand alone and also blended with hard red and spelt.  All of my sandwich bread and yeasted baking, like dinner rolls and cinnamon rolls, contains some or all hard white wheat.

Soft White

This is the variety I use the most for baking leavened with baking soda or baking powder.  I make tortillas, cookies, cake (most dessert baking) with this variety.

Hard Red

This variety I don’t use often.  It’s a lot stronger in flavor and isn’t very good on its own for our taste.  I will blend it with hard white in breads, but could totally do without it.  Sometimes you can find hard red much cheaper though because it’s pretty commonly grown around here, so it pays to have it on hand to stretch your hard white wheat, which is typically a bit more expensive.

Spelt

Spelt is my very favorite grain to work with.  In most dessert baking I have some, if not all, spelt in the recipes.  Spelt makes the absolute best pie crust in the world with its nutty flavor it imparts.  And it’s lovely to work with.  I add a little spelt to almost every recipe, even my bread, because its yummy!  It’s also one of the ancient grains that doesn’t get as much attention as einkorn does.

Einkorn

I don’t use einkorn much since I don’t have a family with gluten sensitivity or a desire to work with it frequently or pay the hefty price tag.  I do use einkorn for cookies.  In my opinion, and my husband’s, the best chocolate chip cookies I make are with einkorn….. and lots of browned butter!  It goes for about $4-5 per pound around here, so I don’t buy very much or use it often because of that.

Now let’s chat what I’ve learned!

How Much Do I Mill?

I stick to the calculation of measuring out 2/3 cup of wheat berries for every cup of flour I will need, regardless of the variety.  This gets you spot on or pretty darn close to exactly what you need.  An even better way is to find the weight of flour you need and measure out the equivalent weight of wheat berries and grind those, which I do with some of my recipes.  Other recipes, like sandwich bread and such, are so variable with how much flour they need, I err on the side of milling extra and just not adding it.

I always mill a bit extra when I have my WonderMill out just to save on dishes and to have a small container in the freezer whenever I need a bit of flour, whether to feed my sourdough starter in a pinch or to thicken a gravy or soup.  Nothing worse than having to mill for just a tablespoon or two of flour in this house! LOL  I keep the extra flour vacuum sealed in a mason jar or in an airtight glass food container and keep it in the freezer.  I would not recommend milling a large quantity days in advance because the flour does oxidize and lose nutritional benefit after even a few hours, so for recipes that are largely made with flour, I would avoid that and just mill as I need it.  Freezing it helps slow that I’m sure, but it doesn’t take that much extra time to mill some flour for a recipe or to feed your sourdough starter.

Hard Wheat Varieties

Hard red and hard white wheat are two hard varieties I have stored here on the homestead.  As I said previously, hard white wheat is our favorite due to the more mild flavor, but we do enjoy some hard red wheat added in for both a stronger flavor and money savings as it is cheaper to buy.  When making recipes that are leavened with yeast (which is also sourdough), you want a hard wheat variety that provides higher protein content for gluten formation.  Soft wheat varieties will not give the gluten strands with kneading and will not form a truly good loaf of bread.  Spelt is also a good variety.  There are folks that use einkorn as well, but that isn’t in my realm of learning yet as its tricky with it’s naturally low gluten content.

Soft Wheat Varieties

Soft white wheat and einkorn are both good for baking recipes that call for a leavening agent like baking powder and baking soda.  I’ve subbed both with some practice and had good luck with it!  Anything that doesn’t require kneading and rising will do good here.  Even biscuits!  Once you make cookies with fresh milled flour, commercial flours will be out and you’ll never look back.  The flavor and texture is unmatched.  

Converting a Recipe from Store Bought Flour to Fresh Milled

Hard Wheat Variety

Let me make this easy, because once you get it in your head, recipe conversions are NOT hard.  For recipes using hard wheat varieties, you will use LESS fresh milled flour than you would store bought flour.  For every 1 cup of store bought flour a recipe calls for, you will decrease the amount of fresh milled flour used.

Example: a bread recipe calls for 3 cups of all-purpose flour.  You would reduce that recipe by 9 tablespoons.  For ease of measuring, I would just reduce by 1/2 cup and in my head plan on needed 2 1/2 cups fresh milled flour, so I would mill1-2/3 cups wheat berries.  If I’m making bread, I would add about 2 cups of flour to the bowl and start mixing and add it slowly from there.  In my experience, all hard varieties plus spelt work well with this calculation.

Soft Wheat Variety

Soft white varieties behave a touch different.  You will use MORE fresh milled soft white wheat in a recipe than store bought processed flour.  You can try starting out by replacing the recipe 1:1 with fresh milled flour, but in my time experimenting, things have been turning out better by adding 1/4 cup more freshly milled soft wheat for each 1 cup of processed flour a recipe calls for.

Example: a cookie recipe calls for 2 cups of all-purpose flour.  You will add an extra 1/2 cup of freshly milled soft wheat to this recipe for a total of 2-1/2 cups fresh milled soft wheat.  In my experience, this has worked with einkorn as well.

Rest & Rehydrate

Learning to rest my dough to rehydrate the fresh milled grains has been hands down the biggest learn that changed my fresh milled game.  Before this, I was ending up with dense, crumbly, and dry bread loaves because I was making them the same as I had using processed flour and just adding flour in a bit at a time until a smooth ball forms.  After the rise time, the dough was incredibly dry!  I add flour until the dough just starts to come together and pull away from the sides a teeny bit.  It still looks pretty wet.  I then cover the dough and start a timer for 20 minutes and let it rest.

I will also mention that many recipes for fresh milled flour call for INSTANT YEAST, which I do not use.  I can never find it and I don’t like using it.  Instant yeast allows you to mix the flour with the liquids, let it rest, and then knead in the yeast. I can’t handle not knowing if the yeast is alive and the anxiety of losing an entire bread batch to dead yeast is not my jam.  I use active dry yeast which I activate first (so I know it’s alive), then start adding flour, and then rest the dough, and then add more flour.  It essentially works the same, you just add the yeast at a different point is all.  So don’t let that hold you up.

Anyway.  After the rest period, begin kneading the dough and you’ll see it readily forms a nice ball most times as the moisture content has changed significantly, and you don’t have to add a whole bunch more flour.  I always knead mine into a slightly tacky ball because I have found the dough does rehydrate further and suck in more moisture during that first rise.  Make sure you coat the dough ball in olive oil or some type of oil to hold in the moisture as well.  Fresh milled dough dries out so easily!

Figuring out how to manage this rest period and get the feel for sourdough bread dough has been a journey I have been a massive failure at so far!  It’s so tricky!

Acid to Tighten Gluten Formation

Adding an acid to any type of yeast bread recipe has been a game changer.  The flavor is undetectable and the result is a nice fluffy dough when fresh milled flour tends to lean towards crumbly and dense.  I’ve never cared enough to research exactly what adding an acid, like lemon juice, does but it works!  I don’t use those additives like rice bran extract, powdered lecithin, or vital wheat gluten, because a little bit lemon juice or sweet whey seems to be all I need.  But I also have never taken the time to learn what those additives will do either :D

I aim to use approximately 1 tablespoon of lemon juice per every 3 cups of hard white or hard red wheat I add. I normally don’t measure either. Dump ‘er in.

Storing the Bread

This is a pretty easy thing to do to have fresh bread.  I’ve found that a loaf of fresh milled bread doesn’t keep very long in a tightly sealed bread bag before it turns into a molded crouton, so I’ve started slicing off what I need and then slicing and flash freezing the rest on a baking sheet.  I then layer them into a freezer bag and pull them out as I need them.  It’s super easy and they thaw very quickly.

Heat From Milling

Lastly.  Is that a word?  When milling your own fresh-ground flour, most mills heat up the flour a bit due to the milling process.  The hotter they get, the more nutrients they denature and such, so that’s a good thing to look into when purchasing an electric mill.  My WonderMill definitely does warm the flour but it’s not crazy hot and they’ve found that it’s one of the better ones to go with in regards to the heat.  That’s a completely different tangent than what I was going to say.  Good grief.  After milling, you can use the warm fresh milled flour right away for recipes that need heat to rise… like bread.  Other recipes, like pastry/pie crust and cookies, I prefer to mill an hour or so ahead of time and place that flour in the freezer to cool it prior to making the recipe so the radiant heat from the flour doesn’t melt the butter I’m cutting in.  If you’re using melted butter in the recipe, you don’t need to cool it.  I hope that makes sense.  I’ve read it 10 times and I think it does…. 

Also… grain mills aren’t just for milling your own wheat berries.  You can make your own rice flour, oat flour, cornmeal, and more with lots of different fresh ground grains!  Cream of wheat?? You can make your own!  Grits?  Yes ma’am!  Just don’t get Facebook started on popcorn again (IYKYK).  You can do a whole big variety of grains when you start milling your own, just be sure the grain mill you purchase can handle them!! Playing around with different grains and blends has been so fun!  I hope this helps spark you to get started with freshly-milled flour and be inspired to try.  Even if you have to make flour with a redneck mortar and pestle… you can do it!

And that, my friends, is what I’ve learned so far in a years’ worth of experimenting with fresh-milled flour as a human with the learning style of I’m just gonna figure it out myself. I can be told something all day long and I will not retain it until I have done it myself and figured it out for myself.  I’m sure to many of you, these things are nothing new and that’s a good thing!  I’m not an expert with this and I’m just sharing what I have picked up and learned so far, so that I can look back in another year and see if I’ve grown anymore.  It’s super fun!