Wooly wrote:

>Order a mill and buy grain in bulk?
>
>

I hate to be honest, but the home mills I've seen produce a very poor
grade of flour from the baker's perspective. Check the recipes at the
web sites that cater to home bakers and sell grain mills for home use.
Virtually all the recipes I've seen use adjuncts to make the bread work
right. Vital wheat gluten, dough conditioner, cottage cheese, and eggs
among them. There's nothing wrong with these ingredients per se, except
that they are unneeded. If you have to add them to make the dough rise,
theres something wrong with your flour, your technique, or both.

Some people use home mills to crack grains to add to other doughs, and
thats very nice and easy to do. It's making flour that will work well
that's hard.

To do a good job of home milling, and make good flour, you need to have
a mill that grinds the grain, not a micronizer mill that shatters it
into microscopic components.

Then you need to sift out the heaviest bran and chaff. And then you get
a nice fresh whole wheat flour that will work well. You can sift it
further and get white flour.

The key advantage of this flour over the stuff you buy in the store is
that its fresh.

However, it won't be consistent. You don't have an army of purchasers
trying to get the best wheat for you. The big mills do. You don't have
a squad of food chemists analysing the wheat to determine how the
different wheats should be combined to give you a flour that handles
(reasonably) consistenly. The big mills do.

Some people say flour you grind is healthier than the stuff in the
stores. Well, the additional nutrients in the wheat are bound by phytic
acid, so they aren't available to you, which means that they aren't
actually more nutritious. You can unlock them through the use of
sourdough, however, these very high ash flours will produce a bread that
is more sour than many home bakers are really after.

At the end of the day, I'd rather not mess with it. There are enough
complications in my life already.

Mike