Homeground flour!

This fall, part of our filling the root cellar involved buying 100 pounds of wheat, and a hand crank grain mill.  We had been baking all our own bread for a couple months, and decided to give home ground flour a try.  Ever wonder why all store bought flour is enriched?  Because wheat berries (the whole wheat kernel), when crushed or cracked or ground, lose about 80% of their naturally occurring nutrients (vitamins, minerals) within about 72 hours.  Store bought flour would otherwise be virtually nutrientless if not enriched with shelf-stable vitamins and minerals.  Freezing cracked wheat or flour can retard this nutrient loss, but in order to be successful you'd have to buy flour directly from the flour mill on the day that it was ground.  The whole wheat berry, however, is so non-perishable you can store it for years!  The choice to go home-ground was a pretty easy one, though finding a good non-electric grain mill proved challenging.  Thankfully, customer reviews are often extremely helpful in finding out more information than the product's packaging will give you, and we decided on the Back to Basics hand crank grain mill.

We are fortunate enough to live within a reasonable distance of a pretty awesome flour mill, Cortez Milling.  You can buy their flours in supermarkets (under the brand Blue Bird Flour), but you can also buy wheat directly from the mill, for crazy cheap.  To start ourselves off on our home grinding adventures, we bought 50lbs of Hard Red Winter Wheat and 50lbs of Hard White Winter Wheat.  As we've learned through research and personal experience, the white wheat makes a much better flour than the red, and the red makes an excellent cereal grain and substitute for rice in any recipe.

It's not difficult to grind flour or crack grain for cereal (trust me, there is nothing like freshly cracked oatmeal!!!), and Wyatt even likes to help!  It doesn't make a truly fine flour, unfortunately.  It doesn't get the bran as fine as the rest of the kernel, and bread made solely with the flour does tend to be a little bit denser, but it is delicious, and oh so nutritious!  We have found that when a finer flour is needed, a quick run through the food processor helps to break up the bran more, and you can sift out the bran (but then you lose a lot of fiber, and it's no longer whole wheat flour, which fairly defeats the purpose).  Eventually we plan on upgrading to the grain mill attachment for our Kitchenaid stand mixer, which reportedly does make a fine flour, but until then, we're pretty happy with our little grain mill!