I don't have to pay a lot for white flour but a 5 pound bag of whole
wheat flour costs 3 or 4 dollars at supermarkets near me that have it
and none of them have rye flour. There are also a few other kinds of
flour at even higher rates at a large supermarket whose name I won't
disclose but which I like to refer to as "Yuppie Heaven". I'd like to
find alternatives that are cheaper and which offer more diversity.

One possibility is to order flour on the web. I only found one place that
does that so far and it specializes in Indian products. Another possibility
is to grind my own flour in some way. Here are a few examples that come to
mind:
(1) N.Thornton recommended rice flour for certain purposes. Can I make my own
rice flour by the following procedure? Take a coffee grinder (e.g. those
little Braun devices for grinding coffee beans) and first grind a little
bread in it to clean any coffee residue from it. Then fill it with
ordinary grains of rice and grind them to a powder.
(2) Similarly, I could grind barley, although I would probably want to wash
the talc off them and dry them first.
(3) I vaguely remember that one can make flour out of acorns, but one needs
to do something first to leach some unpleasant chemical out of them.
(4) I suppose one can do the same with chestnuts, but I'm not sure that all
varieties of chestnuts one finds on the ground are suitable. I have an
even vaguer recollection of there being two main kinds of chestnut in
France and that they are not both suitable, but my memory could be
misleading me on that point.
(5) According to the book, Unmentionable Cuisine, one can grind up dried
grasshoppers and locusts to make a kind of flour. I don't know how one
uses that kind of flour differently from flour made from grains.
(6) In a similar spirit, I've heard of fish flour. I've seen dried fish
on sale in the supermarket, probably cod. I don't know if one simply
grinds it up or if there is something else one has to do first. I think
I've also seen dried shrimp and maybe one can grind it to. I think that
the batter is deep fried and used in some Chinese restaurants to make a
kind of chip for a snack.
(7) There are all kinds of dried foods. Can one grind up practically any of
them to make a kind of flour? Dried mushrooms, dried squid, dried beans,
etc. or is there some quality that a powder has to have to count as a
"flour"?

Ignorantly,
Allan Adler


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* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT Artificial *
* Intelligence Lab. My actions and comments do not reflect *
* in any way on MIT. Moreover, I am nowhere near the Boston *
* metropolitan area. *
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