make your own whole grain flours

Jay Angler wrote:First off, some things people might not know about "Whole Wheat Flour" - at least here in Canada. Whole wheat flour bought from the store, does not include the wheat germ. This is because the fat in wheat germ goes rancid much faster than the rest of the flour. I store wheat germ in the freezer for this reason.
However, wheat germ has a lot of nutrition - things like magnesium,  phosphorus and Vitamins, which we miss out on if we don't add it back in.
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168892/nutrients

To add some of these nutrients back into flour, I take my measuring cup, put 2 Tbsp or more of wheat germ into the cup, then top the rest of the cup up with flour, using the "spoon" method and then levelling it off.

Another solution that I would highly recommend is to make your own whole grain flours out of whole grains!  It requires a bit of an investment (cost me about $300), but it has a lot of advantages.  Storing whole grains at room temperature for years is easy.  People have been doing it for millennia, and it is the principle reason that we adopted so many grains as staple foods - not because of their nutrition or productivity, but because of their ease of storage.  There are a number of brands of home electric grain mills, and even manual mills if you're looking for an arm workout.  I bought myself an electric Mockmill a couple of years ago and love it!  I grind grains into flour in seconds, and I do so within minutes of mixing dough.

You can't get any fresher than that!  And at the rate I use my mill, which is not very often, I fully expect it to last me for many decades.

Matthew Nistico wrote:

Jay Angler wrote:First off, some things people might not know about "Whole Wheat Flour" - at least here in Canada. Whole wheat flour bought from the store, does not include the wheat germ. This is because the fat in wheat germ goes rancid much faster than the rest of the flour. I store wheat germ in the freezer for this reason.
However, wheat germ has a lot of nutrition - things like magnesium,  phosphorus and Vitamins, which we miss out on if we don't add it back in.
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168892/nutrients

To add some of these nutrients back into flour, I take my measuring cup, put 2 Tbsp or more of wheat germ into the cup, then top the rest of the cup up with flour, using the "spoon" method and then levelling it off.

Another solution that I would highly recommend is to make your own whole grain flours out of whole grains!  It requires a bit of an investment (cost me about $300), but it has a lot of advantages.  Storing whole grains at room temperature for years is easy.  People have been doing it for millennia, and it is the principle reason that we adopted so many grains as staple foods - not because of their nutrition or productivity, but because of their ease of storage.  There are a number of brands of home electric grain mills, and even manual mills if you're looking for an arm workout.  I bought myself an electric Mockmill a couple of years ago and love it!  I grind grains into flour in seconds, and I do so within minutes of mixing dough.

You can't get any fresher than that!  And at the rate I use my mill, which is not very often, I fully expect it to last me for many decades.

I love that idea! It's actually eaier for me to get wheat than flour anyway. Just ballpark...what's the volume conversion? How many cups of wheat to make 1c of flour?

Marjorie Vogel wrote:I love that idea! It's actually eaier for me to get wheat than flour anyway. Just ballpark...what's the volume conversion? How many cups of wheat to make 1c of flour?

I'm afraid that I couldn't answer that.  When baking bread, the most surefire way to handle ingredients is by weight, so that is what I do.  Weight is always the same.  500g of wheat berries still weighs 500g after it's ground into flour, still weighs 500g when that flour is lightly sifted, and still weighs 500g when its packed tight.  Similarly, 500g combined of flour and water in a sourdough starter weighs the same when you first mix it as it does later when it has risen to two or three times in volume.

The only thing I can tell you is that, for the convenience of one particular pancake recipe, I figured out that 111g of buckwheat groats would grind into 1 C of buckwheat flour.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful : (

I have a KitchenAid mixer with a grainmill attachment that I use a lot. Combined with the bulk section of the local co-op that has different whole grains, it makes it cheaper to experiment with different types of grain (I found i like Einkorn a lot). There is a time element to it, though if you're making your own bread you already are used to going slow. As a single person it makes more sense to grind my own grain, because I can grind what I need and I'm not left with flour that goes rancid.

We bought an electric Wondermill years ago. It took very little time for it to pay for itself. We could make flour for less than store bought white even we used organic grains from the neighbors. This is one machine that is well worth investing in.

What we liked was that there are no grindstones that might leave gritty particles in the flour. It can also grind quite fine. The flour also adds a wonderful subtle nutty flavor to baked goods that you can't get otherwise.

We use extremely little white flour now. That is reserved for the very few recipes that would get way too dense. I think that amounts to one or two of our many recipes. Everything else is now 100%  freshly milled whole grain and we would never go back.