Home-milled flour

I posted a while back about buying whole wheat berries and have been meaning to follow up. We did mill the flour and bake bread with it and have photos to prove it. They follow, for your enjoyment. Firstly, I wanted to mention a few reasons why we went to all this trouble:

• whole wheat lasts a for years without going stale or rancid.
• commercial milling removes nearly 30% of the the most nutritious parts of the whole grain.
• within 72 hours, whole grain flour has lost over 80% of vitamins.
• people claim that foods made with freshly ground wheat have amazing health benefits, like curing hypoglycemia, constipation, and even warts! I'll get back to you on that.

For bread recipes using freshly ground wheat, go here or here. Overall, you can use it pretty much like regular flour, depending on how fine/course it's ground. Here are our results:

planning ahead

I was reading Radical Mama's post about her plantings plan for the coming year and it got me thinking about our garden and what we might do with it this year.

Last year, we had some herbs (basil, thyme, oregano, and sage), a decent quantity of tomatoes, some cucumbers, sad little bell peppers, and a small amount of raspberries.

I've been meaning to take over a rocky section and build a raised planter near our grills for some extra vegetables; I like the idea of growing us some tubers! Thanks, RM!

On a related topic, I made an unusual purchase recently: when I heard that the price of wheat was skyrocketing, I ordered an item that up till now, I had only poo-poohed Mormons for keeping. "Hard red winter wheat" has high protein levels, is excellent for bread flour (when milled; I bought us a hand mill, too), but can keep for many years if packed in an airtight container with an oxygen absorber.

Next, we need to see how it tastes in the bread AJS makes on weekends. I'll mill it if you bake it, okay?