You also want to avoid heating the flour. Milling is a violent business, and some amount of friction is inevitable, regardless what type of mill you’re using. But overheating your flour isn’t. Heat not only destroys the nutrients and flavorful molecules in flour, but it can also degrade gluten-forming proteins, potentially leaving the flour useless for breadmaking. (There is some dispute as to how hot is too hot for flour—some sources say to avoid temperatures over 115˚F, others say the flour can hit 140˚F before much damage occurs.)
Flour degradation aside, there’s another good reason to avoid heating up your flour: All that heat will go straight into your dough and wreak havoc with fermentation, unless you let it fully cool down first. It’s simpler to keep the flour as cool as possible. One way to do that, other than being sure not to run the mill past the point that the flour begins to heat up: Chill the grains before you mill them to counteract some of the heat gained from friction. With some forethought, it’s easy enough to place the grain in a sealed bag or jar and freeze it for a few hours or even overnight.
Storing whole grains is as simple as keeping them cool, dry, and free from pests. Small quantities are best stored in jars or snap-top containers; larger amounts are best kept in 3- or 5-gallon plastic pails (often available at hardware stores) fitted with an airtight, easy-open screw-top Gamma lid. Stashed away properly, whole grains will keep for a year or more.
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OXO Good Grips POP Container, 4.4 Quart
$20
at AmazonMost supermarkets carry whole grains in 1-pound bags, though the selection may be somewhat limited. And just about any grain you might want can be ordered online in quantities small and large.
You also might be able to purchase them locally, either from nearby small-scale millers or directly from farms. Small millers are often happy to sell you the same whole grains they use to mill their flours. And where I live (in Massachusetts), we even have a “grain CSA” that lets you buy a share of a local harvest each year.
Wheat
If you are milling wheat for bread baking, you’ll want to focus on hard red wheats, which contain substantial amounts of gluten-forming proteins. Winter wheat is planted in the fall, when it sprouts and then goes dormant during the winter months before growing again in the spring. Spring wheat is planted in the spring after the last frost, usually in Northern areas where winter temperatures are too harsh for overwintering wheat. (Both winter and spring wheats are harvested in the fall.) Hard winter wheat contains anywhere from 9 to 14.5% protein, and hard red spring wheat ranges from 11.5 to 18% protein.
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Hard Red Winter Wheat Berries
$15
at AmazonAmazon
Organic Hard Red Winter Wheat Berries
$24
at AmazonSoft wheats (red and white), make flours usually destined for pastries, crackers, and snack foods. They contain 8 to 11% protein. You can use flour milled from soft wheat to make bread, but it will likely need to be combined with some amount of bread flour for adequate structure.
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Soft White Wheat Berries
$14
at AmazonAmazon
Shipetaukin Organic Soft White Wheat Berries
$16.97
at AmazonHard white wheats have a lighter-colored seed coat, so the flours they produce are much whiter in color, even when a substantial amount of bran remains present. (Most of the white wheat grown in the U.S. is destined for Asian markets, where it’s used to make the bright white noodles and breads popular there.) Hard white wheat can contain as much as 17% protein, making it suitable for use in bread, though its flavor is generally considered less complex than most red wheats.
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Be Still Farms Organic Hard White Wheat Berries
$21.99
at AmazonDurum wheat is the hardest of all the wheats, with a protein content of 10 to 17%. Most durum flour is used to make pasta, though it makes wonderful bread as well, thanks both to its distinctive pasta-like flavor and yellow color.
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Great River Organic Milling, Whole Grain Durum Wheat
$23.29
at AmazonRye
Rye is a distant relative of wheat, and does not contain gluten-forming proteins, so it cannot be used by itself to produce airy, lightly-textured breads. But it does contain sticky polysaccharides known as arabinoxylans that act somewhat like gluten to give rye breads structure. It is arabinoxylans’s ability to bind up to four times more water than wheat does that gives German and Scandinavian 100% rye flour breads their unique consistency and ultralong shelf life.
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Mulberry Lanes Organic Rye Berries
$19.99
at AmazonAncient grains
So-called ancient grains such as emmer, Khorasan (also known as kamut), einkorn, and spelt are all close relatives of wheat. (The Italian grain farro is synonymous with emmer and can be found in many supermarkets.) They all contain gluten to varying degrees and can be used on their own to make breads with a relatively open structure.
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Bobs Red Mill Grain Farro 24oz.
$12
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Organic Einkorn Whole Wheat Berries 32oz.
$17.90
at AmazonAmazon
Organic Kamut Khorasan Wheat Berries
$39
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Hildegard's Original Organic Spelt Berries
$12
at AmazonOther grains
Barley and oats are distant relatives of wheat that are often milled and used in breads. Barley is more closely related to wheat, but neither of these grains contain substantial amounts of gluten and must be combined with wheat flour to make a decent loaf.
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Yupik Organic Oat Groats
$6.49
at AmazonCorn can also be milled at home. Impact mills can handle popcorn (it can be used to make amazing polenta, actually), but it is generally considered too hard to put through a burr mill. If you’d like to make cornmeal or corn flour in your burr mill, you will need to start with softer-kerneled flint or dent corn.
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Organic Yellow Whole Corn by JoJo's Organics
$20
at AmazonYou can even grind rice, beans, and herbs using a mill. In fact, the only dried foods you cannot put through a mill are oily ingredients like coffee beans, nuts, and oily seeds, which will quickly turn to a paste that will gum it up.
If you are used to baking with roller-milled white flour, making the shift to whole grain wheat flours can be challenging because whole grain flours are “thirstier” than refined ones (meaning they require more water to achieve a comparable texture), and the presence of hard, sharp bran interferes with proper gluten development. The simplest approach for beginners is to swap out small percentages of the white flour in your recipe for whole grain flour (while also increasing the water content in the dough to account for the extra absorption). In my experience, recipes can tolerate as much as 30% whole wheat flour without significant impact on texture
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