On Sunday, July 17, 2005, at 10:08 PM, Mike Avery wrote:

> I hate to be honest, but the home mills I've seen produce a very poor
> grade of flour from the baker's perspective.

I've been using an $85 dollar KA mill attachment for about 18 years,
baking bread no less than twice a week, often three times now that I
have teenagers. It certainly won't mill a super fine pastry flour, but
with long fermentations, the grain breaks down just fine. The mill
produces flour equivalent to KA whole wheat. Personally, I set it to
grind a bit coarser because I get a better quality dough. The feel
isn't glue-like.

> 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.
>

Very true, but look at any cookbook, same thing. The adjunct issue
isn't a mill issue... it's a cultural one. Our contemporaries (out
there) think bread needs eggs, milk, honey, sugar and what-all.

Those bakers have their own news-group, it's called bread-bakers-list
or something.

> 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.
>

I've not used a micron-izer mill though I'm betting you are right. I
read, somewhere in Hamelman's book, that a miller had to replace his
micron-izer unit because his commercial customers did not like the
flour it produced. The subject was starch damage.

> 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.

There are times when I have to urge to buy a lab shaker and a few
screens <g>.

My solution is longer ferments/retards. I also omit kneading, which is
another one of the myths we've inherited. Fully hydrated bran isn't
nearly as destructive as dry bran being whipped around a bowl for 6 or
7 minutes.

> 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.
>

The blending to produce an ash number, protein number, falling number
is certainly interesting. But isn't this "big mills" reasoning similar
to the argument that filled the grocery shelves with cake and pancake
mixes after WWII? Are men in white coats with clipboards are necessary
to evaluate quality? (Forgive me, I just reread Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance.)

> 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.

I must be doing something wrong. I had to cadge some of that ACME going
around to get sour <g>. My buried dough ball levains are sweet.
Seriously... I suspect a lot of that "sourness" folks experience is due
to stale flour, heat damaged flour, rancid germ oils, etc...

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

But not bread, right? Never bread.

Will