So you’ve been convinced of the benefits of using fresh-ground flour instead of store-bought. It’s likely you’re now feeling:
- A sudden urge to bake every single one of your recipes that uses flour, and simply substitute cup for cup.
- A crazy amount of overwhelm once your beloved recipe flops and you realize it’s not that simple.
- A sense of buyer’s remorse over the amount of money you spent on a grain mill and wheat berries.
Before you throw in the towel and list your mill for sale on Facebook Marketplace, let me offer a few tips I’ve learned as I’ve experimented with fresh-ground flour myself over the last year.
Different kinds of wheat berries are needed for different kinds of recipes.
While others are available and I might continue to experiment, I like to keep two kinds of wheat berries on hand: Hard white wheat has a high protein and gluten content, and works well for breads that need to rise. Soft white wheat is great for quick breads, cookies, pancakes, etc.
A blend of these two is what typically gives you the “all-purpose” flour you’d buy at the store. Red wheat gives a darker, denser, more whole-wheat type of flour.
FYI: A 25-lb bag of wheat berries fits nicely into a 5-gallon bucket, with a gamma lid for easy access.
Grind your flour as fine as possible.
Every grain mill I’ve seen has some sort of adjustment for how fine you’d like to grind your grains. Sometimes you’ll want a coarser grind for something like cornmeal, but generally for flour I crank mine as tight as I can. Or you could sift your ground flour, to take out the coarser pieces, but then you lose the benefits of using the whole berry.
Fresh ground flour can be warm.
Depending on what you’re making, this might not make any difference. But if you’re planning on a pie crust where you cut cold butter into your flour and use cold water to combine it and form a nice flaky crust, realize your flour straight out of the mill could melt your butter! It just means you’ll need to plan ahead a little more and stick your fresh flour in the fridge or freezer for a bit before continuing.
Measure your fresh ground flour by weight, not volume.
This is actually my top tip for success with fresh-ground flour. Here in the States we’re used to using cups (a measure of volume, or the space it takes up) instead of weight in almost all of our recipes. I remember watching the Great British Bake-Off and wondering why they seemed to use a scale for everything. It’s for consistency.
When a bag of flour sits on a grocery store shelf, it weighs the same every day. But over time it will compact and settle, taking up less space. After awhile, it’s pretty consistent for a cup to be a cup.
But when you grind your flour fresh, air is naturally added. And using the flour immediately doesn’t give time for settling. Therefore a “cup” of fresh flour actually contains less flour than a cup from a store-bought bag. Which skews your recipe.
I’m slowly working on converting my recipes to weights, but in general a cup of flour weighs about 125 grams. So while I’m in the kitchen I can ask “Alexa, what’s 125 times [2.5]?” and find out how many grams of flour my recipe needs.
It’s up to you if you’d prefer to weigh your berries or the flour itself — it should be about the same if your mill works properly. If I plan to grind just enough flour for the recipe I’m making, I’ll weigh the berries. Sometimes I’ll grind extra and store it in a container in the cupboard for up to a week, and weigh that flour as I use it.
I now use my kitchen scale for so many other things, I wonder how I survived the previous 15 years of home cooking without one!
Rest or chill your dough.
Fresh flour soaks up liquid differently than regular flour, so while making a recipe your dough will seem wetter than you’re used to. Instead of adding more flour to compensate, give the dough time to settle.
For breads, mix all the ingredients together then let it sit for 10-20 minutes before beginning to knead. For cookies, pastries, etc, mix your batter then put the bowl in the fridge for 30 minutes before continuing.
Go by sight and feel.
If after weighing your flour and resting/chilling your dough it still seems wetter than previous times making the recipe, go ahead and add more flour a little at a time. If it’s bread dough being sticky when kneading, try oiling your hands and the countertop. There’s a fine line between enough flour to be workable and too much flour that makes a loaf dense.
Experiment! Keep sticky notes in the kitchen. Write down how much flour you ended up using, and the next time you make the recipe start with that amount. Keep adjusting. Worst-case your loaf ends up flat, your cookies spread out too much, or everything is hard as a rock. Make grilled cheese sandwiches, crumble the cookies over ice cream, or just put it in the compost or chicken bucket. (Recently I forgot to add salt to my sandwich loaf. Ugh. So much wasted flour! But the chickens didn’t care.)
Start with half fresh ground flour and half store-bought.
Between flavor, texture, and the learning curve, don’t throw away that bag of store-bought flour just yet. For many months I continued to use some of both in my recipes. Just be sure to use that scale!
After lots of practice, using fresh-ground flour is now second nature to me. Other than kicking myself when I don’t plan ahead (“shoot, I’d wanted to start a loaf of sourdough tonight but the kids are in bed and now I don’t want to use the mill…”) and still turning out some ugly flat loaves, I can’t imagine going back. The flavor is amaaaaaazing, and I’m confident the health benefits are there too (though they’re not quite as obvious).
What other questions do you have about using fresh-ground flour?
“‘When anyone brings a grain offering to the Lord, their offering is to be of the finest flour. They are to pour olive oil on it, put incense on it and take it to Aaron’s sons the priests. The priest shall take a handful of the flour and oil, together with all the incense, and burn this as a memorial portion on the altar, a food offering, an aroma pleasing to the Lord.'”
Leviticus 2:1-2
Thanks for this! I recently got a grain mill and will be getting wheat berries soon, so this is really helpful as I start on my fresh flour journey!
Yay! If you ever have more questions feel free to ask!
How long does a 25lb container of wheat berries last you? Like a year or more etc?
Hmm it’s tough to say. Some months I definitely bake much more often than others. Also I use either hard or soft or a combination of both depending on the recipe. Looking back at my Azure Standard orders over the last few years, I’d say during fall/winter I was averaging ordering 25 lbs of hard white every 3 months and soft white every 3-4 months (baking just a loaf or two of bread, muffins, pancakes, etc each week), but during spring/summer it would be 6 months or more.
When you say you “turn your mill all the way fine as far as it can go” doesn’t it grind the stones then? If I start hearing the stones grind then have I gone to far? My flour seems too course but if I turn my mill dial any farther then I start to hear the stones grind.
So far (I’ve had my mill 3 years) I haven’t had any issues with my stones as long as they’re as tight as I can make them when the berries are going through. I always start with the stones looser, add the berries, tighten, then as soon as I hear the higher-pitched sound it makes from stone against stone when the berries are empty, I loosen them right back up again. I imagine the stones would wear on each other if left tight for a longer period of time.