I want to get both the oval and original bread ovens in a colour that is easy to maintain. I am considering satin black but I also really like meringue.. help!
Since the wondermill is out of stock and looks like it's hard to get do I wait for it to come back in stock OR do I purchase a Mock Mill, and then the question is 100 or 200? I'm new to this however I also want to make sure I'm purchasing something that will last and I can do what I want. So basically it'll be alot of just wheat flour for the most part but I also want to do corn to make nacho's and torts and then whatever else I find when heading down this little rabbit hole of fun.
I’m just dipping my toes into the fresh milled flour world. I’m on the hunt for a grain mill and I’ve narrowed it down between two mills; both Nutrimill brand. Looking at the impact grain mill or the classic. Looks like the impact grain mill is best for bread flour and the classic is good for more variety. My question is around the difference between fresh milled bread flour and fresh milled flour for general baking. Can I use the impact grain mill for bread flour AND any other baking needs? What is the difference between using the impact mill for all baking vs the classic?
I see myself milling flour for bread, pizza, naan, pancakes, muffins, etc. looking for some resources, but struggling to understand the difference and if I need the classic mill or if the impact mill will suffice.
Thanks in advance!
After weeks of tweaking grains, pan sizes, oven temperature, and bake times, I finally made pretty loaves. 810 grams hard white, 160 grams spelt. Great crumb and delicious flavor.
I am new to sourdough and thinking about milling my own flour. I research everything before a big purchase like buying a flour mill, and a friend has suggested the nutrimill basic.
Before I buy the mill, I want to buy storage for the wheat berries. I know I will want to experiment with soft and hard berries. What are the best storage methods for country living in your opinion? I am looking for glass or metal storage most likely. I want to avoid plastic storage for a couple of reasons.
Thank you for your input!
ETA - Thank you for your responses! I will be buying gamma lids and half-gallon jars since I don't know how much I will be using in a month/year yet.
Hello! Happy Mother's Day to any Mom's on here!
I'm relatively new to baking, but over the past year and a half I've been making my own sourdough recipes. After a full year I decided to pull the trigger and my birthday present just arrived!! Finally excited to start with fmf.
My staple recipes currently are:
1)Bim's Sourdough English muffins
2)regular sourdough bread
3)sourdough tortillas
Anyone have any tried and true beginner friendly recipes?
I have hard red, white, soft, korasian, einkhorn, rye currently to work with. Thank you!
I use these recipes (below) pretty reliably with supermarket flour or commercial locally ground flour, but not homemade ground. I've recently been handed down a cool old high quality german flour manual grinder, and after spending a quarter of an hour to grind out two precious cups of wheat, it's pretty heart breaking when the bread fails.
Looking online the advice varies from 'add more water!' (??? isn't the fresh ground wheat already far less dry than supermarket flour?) to 'reduce the first rise time by 25%', I've tried both of these and I think I actually made it worse.
Does anyone else manage to get a good rise on either dutch oven or overnight or plain wholemeal bread using wheat they've just ground (as in an hour ago)?
https://www.jennycancook.com/recipes/2-hour-fastest-no-knead-bread/
https://www.jennycancook.com/recipes/simple-whole-wheat-bread/
https://www.jennycancook.com/recipes/10-grain-no-knead-bread/
I have had a Wondermill on backorder for a while now, and it keeps getting pushed back. I can get a Nutrimill Classic right now and I'm wondering if I should just switch gears and buy that. Anyone out there have had both and have any input as to liking one over the other? Would truly appreciate any opinions. Thanks.
First timer here. I've been watching my sister experiment for the last year, and it's pretty incredible to taste/feel the difference in FMF. My sister has been getting 5-6 gal. buckets of hard red wheat from her husband's family. She had the buckets with the gamma lids lined up like a small wall in the kitchen until we helped organize a cool, dry spot in the basement.
I don't know that I can make that kind of room at my house. She bakes probably every other day for her family. I would probably only be baking once or twice a week.
So ... questions: How are you storing your bulk grains? Guessing you re-use the buckets by buying/refilling with bags of grain instead of buying more buckets?? I don't think I want to store in the bags, right? Maybe I should buy 25 lbs rather than 50 lbs at a time.
I got the idea that I wanted lots and lots of nigella seeds inside challah. Now that I’ve done it, I’ll concede I was a little heavy-handed on the nigella, but it all came together really nicely in a sandwich.
Challah: half recipe of https://smittenkitchen.com/2008/09/best-challah-egg-bread/ using fresh milled and 60-mesh sifted hard red wheat, except that I always use instant yeast and just dump all the ingredients in one go rather than the order in the recipe. I added nigella seeds with a few folds by hand after kneading in a mixer, then proofed overnight in the fridge before shaping and baking the next day.
I just bought my own Mockmill and certified ecological grain. After I milled it and prepared the dough and everything, I checked the wheat bag and I saw a mice dropping. I threw everything. I am so deflated. I was so excited about making my own bread. Does this happen often? Did you ever find mice droppings in grain? Is my mill contaminated? My son and I PLAYED with the flour, ate a snack on the side, also contaminated flower everywhere. I am so sad and anxious now.
Hello all,
I'm going to run an experiment this weekend. I do fresh milled, but I believe I have a batch (50Lb) that is the size of hard white but behaves like soft white. It's got that white opaque look to it that is not what hard white looks like- but the size is that of hard. There have been a few threads on the fresh milled forum talking about this and a few people have wound up with the same berries as me. I've been assured by the seller that it is hard white. This is a big bulk seller. You usually have to unload product from the truck yourself, wink wink.
Anyways, I want to do some side by side comparisons to test what I have. The bread that I've tried to make with this grain has been absolute trash; nothing rises. I have switched back to 'better' wheat currently and it behaves as expected- a good rise and decent bread. I'm no pro, but if I follow a recipe it shouldn't be trash like I've had- I blame the materials.
So I'm going to do banana bread and chocolate chip cookies side by side using actual soft white wheat and my questionable wheat- that I believe is soft white but label says hard. What should I expect if I use a hard white with the appropriate protein content in quickbreads?
Thanks in advance. I really want to figure out what is going on with this wheat. I don't want to throw it out, but I need to understand what I have!
How important is it to use gluten? I use hard red wheat.
Just got a Mockmill 100 and milled Hard White for pasta.
Came out alright. The dough needed water that usual (typically I use just egg), and it came out a little gritty.
I supposed i needed to add even more water. Will give bread a shot tomorrow.
I had a lot of trouble. First loaves of home milled. I sifted out only the biggest bran.
It took around 30-35 minutes on a kitchenaid to become workable. It was extremely sticky, and I had to use a scraper to be able to even shape it.
I also ended up milling a fee handfuls more of grain to bring the hydration down.
The result was a pretty tight crumb, soft, but rather dense.
Feedback welcome.
I just got my mockmill and flecks/strips of the millstone were coming off while I was running rice through it for the first use. I stopped, checked to make sure the stones were properly calibrated (they were) and reran it. One entire bag of rice later, I’m still getting black stone specks in my flour. It got better when compared to the first run, but it’s still there, and it’s making the flour unusable.
I have several questions:
Has anyone else had an experience like this? Again, this was my first time ever using this mill.
Are my millstones damaged? Does this kind of damage make the machine unusable?
I sent a message to customer support but I’m feeling anxious while awaiting a response, especially since I waited months for this to ship. Thanks in advance to anyone who can share any insight!
My loaf turned out great for my first one! Of course a more open crumb would be nice, any tips? I am loving the taste so much.
Hoo boy this is gonna be a learning curve. But I knew that before going into it. This was my first attempt of hopefully very many at a loaf! I'll link the recipe I used at the end of the post. I will admit, I did deviate from the recipe a decent amount. That’s probably why it turned out the way it did, being so dense and too brown on top (I think?).
I've been making loaves with bread flour for almost a year now. My end goal was always to gain the confidence to transition over to milling my own flour and making loaves with that, just had to learn the basics first. While I didn’t have 100% successes with my loaves there, I did have many good loaves and other breads (breadsticks, buns, rolls). From there, I felt like I was ready to try my hand at home milled!
I got myself a bag of Khorasan (Kamut?) and a Nutrimill Impact Mill. After following the directions to get the flour, that’s where it all changed from my past experiences.
Firstly, the flour by itself already smelled heavenly. That got me super excited from the start. I knew that milled flour needed more hydration than store bought and that it needed time to soak up some of the water. I'm sad I didn’t get a picture of it, just forgot. When I got to the autolyse(?) portion with the flour and liquid, the "dough" felt like chunky pancake batter at best. It was super wet compared to what I'm used to. I'm used to ~65% hydration and this one was almost 75% right out the gate. Figured it was due to needing more water for the flour, no biggie I'll follow the recipe and see how it goes.
I unfortunately didn’t see that the recipe I used, the baker had some kind of mixer. I do not own any stand mixers and have only ever made bread by hand. I wish I'd seen that before starting so I could've looked for another recipe, but it was too late. I moved forward with it and dumped it onto my counter that had a bit of oil on it to help with not sticking. At this point, it felt like a weird paste. Pretty sure it wasn't the right consistency here, oh well we press on.
I start, very unsuccessfully, trying to knead the dough. Covered my hand with oil to help sticking, no dice. Palm was covered in dough in about 30 seconds. Again, we press on. I kept pushing through it and kneading for ~5 min? It felt like it was getting slightly better but not enough. I understand milled flour takes longer to knead fully... now. I admit I started to panic a bit in the moment. I added ~50g more flour, maybe more, to it because I just could not get it to the texture I was familiar with. Hydration now is brought to below 67%.
It quickly got to a slightly more familiar texture but still a little grainy. I was worried about it now and was scared that it would be grainy and inedible after baking. I figured there was just one way to find out. You guessed it, we press on.
I shaped it into some semblance of a dough ball and placed it in a bowl with some oil and rolled it about. Put it in my oven with the light on (how I usually proof my bread, the light is a wonderful heat source) for 2 hours. Hour 1, literally no change. Cortisol spike. Hour 1.5, slight increase. Cortisol levels, but still elevated. Hour 2, huzzah! Double size!! This put me way way way at ease to see the proofing work.
I unloaded it back to my counter to shape (I followed their small loaf pan recipe and made one large one). After shaping, I placed it in my (seemingly) well oiled loaf pan for the second proof. Only proofed this for about 30 minutes.
Baked it for 30 minutes and took it out. All my previous loaves just slid right out of the pan every time. But this one did not. I thought surely it'll come out if I shake it enough. Well, most of it did at least. Honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting when I did that, the result was on me. After it ripped out like that, I realized that I should've temped it to see if it was even done. It was barely at 170F. So I put it back together and put it in for 15 minutes. Definitely too long, should've put it in for 10 at most, that was my bad too.
After the added 15, it was well in temp and I popped it out. It slid out and I got the other chunk out and Lego'd it back onto the master loaf. No reason not to I suppose. Let it cool down for a couple hours before the first cut despite the steam likely escaping from the gaping hole in the bottom, but I still waited.
Sadly, she was denser a block of tungsten but the shape held up phenomenally! Even though it's pretending to be a neutron star, I still wholeheartedly believe I made a relatively successful loaf of bread! I'll chalk it up to beginners luck until I'm able to replicate it, or make a better one.
I've far exceeded my own expectations that I'd set for myself. I was fully prepared for an inedible lump of sadness. I am very happy with the result despite its shortcomings and my motivation to continue working has never been higher! I think I'll look for a different recipe though. This one used instant yeast while I only have active dry, I tried to adapt it as best as I could.
I'm open to any other recipes that you all might recommend with 100% Khorasan and only hand kneading with it. I don’t plan to buy a mixer, I like the feeling of kneading by hand. Makes me happy! Until next time, we press on!
Recipe: https://grainsinsmallplaces.net/everyday-sandwich-bread-made-with-fresh-milled-flour-easy-recipe/
Does anyone have any experience with soft red wheat? I'm aware it's more for things not leavened with yeast. But I've found a local farm that's got 50lb bags for $10. Can I use vital wheat gluten to make it more like hard wheat? I'm aware of the risks of getting wheat that isn't human certified and yada yada. I know what the possible risks are, and Im not particularly concerned
Hi everyone! Got really into baking my own bread during covid (like everyone) and have kind of gotten out of it. Actually found out I had PCOS and cut back really heavily on carbs and specifically processed carbs, and I switched out white bread for whole grains and sourdough (lower GI breads) and I’ve noticed a real difference.
Been seeing a lot of things about milling my own flour and want to try that out for the health reasons. I currently only have a small ninja blender that I’ve had for years and is not designed for something like this. Any tips/tricks on milling my own flour with a non-vitamix blender and for baking with it afterwards? Seems like wheat berries are the standard but sure is there another grain better for this situation or a type of bread I should try making? Fine with the flour being decently coarse since its likely to be difficult to get a fine grain with this kind of blender - I’ve also heard that a course flour can help the GI and this is more for health reasons.
I want to at least try using my existing blender for now but if it looks like milling my own flour will make a difference in the way I can eat bread I’ll definitely look into getting something like a vitamix.