#82 – Home-Milling Flour for the Best Bread!

I know milling my own flour is better and I want to do it, but where do I start?

Home milling can be such a joy and we’re here in this episode to guide you through all the hows.

We’ll talk the multiple benefits of milling at home and fill any gaps in knowledge you might have. We’ll explain how you can grind a grain, what mills are available for your kitchen and the benefits of each one, then I’ll share how I mill at home, the organisation around it and what I make. And stay till the end as we’ll also squeeze in a chat about how home-milled flour is different to shop bought and how you can best work with this amazing food stuff in your own kitchen.

Get the Ancestral Kitchen Podcast Guide to Milling Your Own Flour here!

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What we cover:

  • Four reasons to mill your own flour – health, flavour, economy & connection
  • Why home-milled flour is healthier
  • How home-milled flour is more economical
  • Why prehistoric women had bigger arm muscles than modern Olympic rowers!
  • How to use fresh grains for bread when you don’t have a mill
  • Types of mills; how flour can be ground
  • Roller-milling v. stone-grinding
  • Milling options for the home kitchen
  • Alison’s mill: the Mockmill 100
  • What you can grind in the Mockmill
  • How to use the Mockmill
  • Freshly-ground flour is for more than just bread
  • How home-milled flour is different to shop bought and how to work with that

PLUS, in the patron-exclusive aftershow, we continue the conversation and talk about:

  • How to adapt all purpose flour recipes to wholegrain home-milled flour
  • Why the autolyse process is particularly helpful for wholegrain flour
  • Sieving flour
  • The economics of shop-bought flour compared with bulk-bought grains

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Resources:

See Alison’s Mockmill here plus use these links to purchase your own and support the podcast

Find Alison’s sourdough mentoring here: One-off troubleshooting session

Four-call ‘Get Going with Ancient Grain Sourdough’ package

Rat study referenced here

Prehistoric women and their strong arms

King Arthur Baking article on substituting wholewheat flour for white on all-purpose

50 Ways to Save Money Download

50 Ways to Save Money on an Ancestral Diet, episodes 66 and 67

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The podcast is mixed and the music is written and recorded by Alison’s husband, Rob. Find him here: Robert Michael Kay

 

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Transcript:

Alison:
I know milling my own flour is better and I want to do it, but where do I start? Home milling can be such a joy and we’re here in this episode to guide you through all the hows. We’ll talk the multiple benefits of milling at home and fill in any gaps in knowledge you may have. We’ll explain how you can grind a grain, what mills are available for your kitchen and the benefits of each one. Then I’ll share how I mill at home, the organisation around it and what I make. And stay till the end as we’ll also squeeze in a chat about how home milled flour is different to shop bought and how you can best work with this amazing foodstuff in your own kitchen.

Music:
Music

Alison:
Welcome to the ancestral kitchen podcast with allison a european town dweller in central italy and andrea living on a newly created family farm in northwest washington state usa, pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating cooking and living with ancient ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.

Music:
Music

Andrea:
Hello, Alison. Good afternoon. Good morning. How are you?

Alison:
Good morning. I’m good, thank you. And you?

Andrea:
I am also well. I’m a little chilly. That’s fine. I’ve got some fuzzy blankets wrapped around me. always

Alison:
Handy always handy have you had some breakfast this morning.

Andrea:
I did I had um well as I actually we just hard-boiled a ton of eggs this past week I

Alison:
Saw all your eggs on discord salad yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah even more I think the kids are gathering about 40 a day right now wow so it’s crazy um but we made egg salad and I had some of that my mom made some loaves of bread for us and so I had egg salad on bread and a glass of water it was what I wanted so that’s what I had some

Alison:
Days it goes like that doesn’t it.

Andrea:
Yeah, it does. And you, I’m sure you ate lunch. Yeah. Was it late for you?

Alison:
Yeah. What did you have? We did. Gable’s at home because it’s holiday. And I’m doing, I did separate food.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Alison:
Yeah. I did separate food for them.

Andrea:
Always.

Alison:
Because I’m eating a very low histamine at the moment. So I, for the boys, there was some chicken soup in the freezer that I’d made previously with chicken, mushroom, cream and broth, which I freeze in little one cup portions. And so I got two of those out last night for the boys. And then I had two fried eggs with fried sweet potato. I cut it into little coins and put it in the cast iron pan with lard. And cauliflower. And I did a ton of cauliflower. And then I just put another portion into the soup for Gabriel and for Rob. And so they had an extra cauliflower and I had one on my plate.

Andrea:
Sounds really good.

Alison:
It’s delicious. I love cauliflower.

Andrea:
Gosh i don’t think i’ve ever put cauliflower in chicken soup yeah now that you said that

Alison:
Gable loved it well he loves the chicken soup so he’ll eat anything but he loves cauliflower too actually of course of course so um it went down really well.

Andrea:
Didn’t you say rob wasn’t sold on cauliflower in the beginning but yeah

Alison:
Now he’s the complete convert yeah complete.

Andrea:
It’s so funny because you were just saying in the discord oh yeah well rob actually likes cod liver oil yeah like the flavor yeah but here and he’s like cauliflower exactly

Alison:
You’ve got your spoon full of cauliflower oil or cauliflower yeah i’ll take the cauliflower.

Andrea:
Please explain yourself

Alison:
Maybe one day i’ll get him on here to explain himself.

Andrea:
So um before we started i was going to read a review yeah um that we got on the podcast i’m just going to read part of it because it was a nice one and a long one but i’m just going to read a part of it. Um, so we recorded an, um, two part episode, um, A little while back, the 50 ways to save money within your ancestral food living. And this was a comment that we got from J. Lynn Hooley. I think I’m reading that right. Yeah. And the title was, what a great double episode.

Andrea:
So Jalen Hooley says if I download the list of 50 things there would be a lot of checks so yeah we must be thinking along the same lines you are so right about these things as I do work on a farm for meat, eggs and veggies I have found a great niche at farmers markets by helping out with sales for the beginning rush in exchange for food, they don’t need me the whole time, I can testify to that experience at farmers markets And I have created a sourcing list for each food I put up. Like you, I say yes to everything, especially to B-grade things at markets. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. Love that. And I love that you love the episode, Jalen Hooley, because those are all things that Allison and I, or both of us, one or the other, both of us have found very useful.

Alison:
If anyone hasn’t got that download yet, she talked about the download of the 50 things. It’s on our website, which is ancestralkitchenpodcast.com. And just go to downloads and you can find it right at the top and you can download that list for yourself.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s right. Or if you have somebody who, you know, wants to join you on the quest and wants some tips for saving money.

Alison:
Yeah, you can give it to them.

Andrea:
It’d be good for them too. Yeah, it’s good. I think it’s a good one if you’re already neck deep in the ancestral food and it’s a good one if you’re just kind of starting out. Yeah. You know, either way, there should be something on there that’s useful. I agree.

Alison:
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Andrea:
Speaking of saving money, Alison, this episode is kind of going to hit on something that saves people a lot of money, especially since so many of our listeners are making a lot of their baked things at home. So this is something that you kind of went down the rabbit hole on and then some of us in the Patreon were like, please tell us a little bit more. So, yeah. Can you introduce the topic?

Alison:
Of course, I can. We are talking about home milling today and do stay to the end because after we’ve talked about all the hows and whys and wherefores of home milling, we will also talk about how home milled flour is different than shop bought flour when the rubber hits the road and you are making bread in your kitchen.

Andrea:
Okay so okay now i know you and i know

Alison:
That something.

Andrea:
Sends you off on these discoveries so what started this for you

Alison:
Yeah you do know me that once i start with something i’m like right and i’m gone down a rabbit hole completely so yeah i am, A few months ago, I took the plunge and bought my own mill. And I’ve been thinking about it for a very, very long time, but not actually done it. And listeners may have heard back in episode 70 that was a while back now, which was our fermenting oats episode. Me talk about the reason that pushed me over the edge in that episode and buying that mill, which I bought a mock mill 100.

Alison:
So that’s really where this has come from. and I’ve been playing with that meal now for six months and doing amazing things with it and making amazing bread with it and I wanted to share with listeners because I know we get a lot of questions, about milling and meals and the difference between them and and working with home milled flour and whether it’s worth it buying a meal so I’m going to touch on all of those things and more um and you’ll kind of hear my story a bit more about why I did it as we go through the different reasons and the first question that I thought listeners might have is why mill your own flour and I try to distill that the reasons why I think that’s a good thing to do and I’ve come up with four kind of categories so we’ve got health, flavour, economy and connection and starting with health because really that was my number one reason for getting that mock meal. We eat bread a lot in our family. You know, it’s not something that we’re just having once a week. We’re eating it every day. And because bread is a food that we’re eating every day, it feels really important to me that it’s as healthy and as nutrient-dense as it possibly can be.

Alison:
And I remember reading Weston Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a while ago. And some of the cultures in there not all of them use grains in that book there is no mention of sourdough fermenting anything like that that could be because it’s just assumed that everyone did sourdough but there’s no specific mentions of it but what there is is so much emphasis on how traditional cultures he visited that used grains freshly ground that grain and he talks throughout the visits to different cultures of that but he also talks at the end whenever he talks about grain products he talks about them being freshly ground it’s really it’s really a focus.

Alison:
So I’d read that and kind of felt how important that was in the work that he did. And then I read a study by a guy called Bernasek, which was published in 1970. And I’m going to quote something, which there’ll be a link to in the show notes. So you can go and kind of look it up if you want. But that study was on some rats and those rats were fed carbohydrate in the form of flour or bread. So let me read a summary of it. Rats were fed diets consisting of 50% flour or bread. Group one consumed fresh stone ground flour. Group two was fed bread made with this flour. Group three consumed the same flour as group one, but after 15 days of storage. Group four was fed bread made with a flour fed to group three. A fifth group consumed white flour. After four generations, only the rats fed fresh stone ground flour and those fed the bread made with it maintained their fertility. The rats in groups three to five had become infertile. Four generations for rats is believed to be the equivalent of 100 years in humans.

Alison:
And that study, when I shared it with you first of all Andrea I mean it just, it blew me away, it’s just amazing isn’t it.

Andrea:
Yeah, kind of grim.

Alison:
Yeah, very grim. So frankly, just the groups that were fed freshly stone ground flour and bread made with that maintain the fertility. The groups that weren’t, even the ones that were fed the flour after 15 days of storage became a fertile time.

Alison:
And that just, it just made me stop and think, oh my gosh. And you know I remember when we did our interview with Marcus Patchett the chocolate guy way way back he talked about fairy dust in chocolate and it was kind of a joking term but he meant it in terms of all those tiny little things that are amazing and that are in chocolate and I feel like it’s the kind of the same thing here with bread you know we think of the starch the carbohydrate and we know that there are things in those grains that are not as prevalent in our heads as the starch that do good things but I really think there’s just a myriad of tiny sort of chemicals and particles that do things and that when we grind that grain and expose those to oxygen they degrade and we are losing whatever goodness they can impart to us when we leave our flour on the shelf and let those things just go into the air because they’re oxidizing or you know degrade because they’re oxidizing and it feels like the equivalent of that fairy dust in you know in beautiful chocolate that flour when it’s freshly ground has these amazing properties.

Alison:
That if we want our diets to be as nutrient-dense as possible and we’re eating bread a lot, which my family are.

Alison:
Then capturing those and baking them into bread is a great thing to do. So, when I read that, it sent me kind of diving into a bit more deeply, you know, what happens when we leave flour on the shelf after we’ve ground it. And, you know, we know that vitamins and minerals are lost. They literally go down. and what was important in that fermenting oats episode I did is that phytase which is the compound that neutralizes phytic acid in grains remember the phytic acid is the thing that can stop you absorbing minerals like calcium phytase neutralizes phytic acid and phytase is lost, when you leave flour out on the shelf so for example rye that as you know I work with a lot that had high levels of phytase wonderful to put into oats which don’t have high levels of phytase but if you’re using oat if you’re using rye flour that’s been sat on a shelf for really not long i mean that study said 15 days but my less than two weeks my research has shown much less than that um then you’re not going to have that phytase anymore um we also know.

Alison:
That fats oxidize when they’re exposed to air um and so therefore that’s going to cause potentially whole grain flour to go rancid and we just don’t know i mean when you buy shop-bought flour you don’t know how long ago it was milled you don’t know how long it was been on the shelf you know you it’s an impossible thing to try and get your head around yeah and And yeah, go on.

Andrea:
Even with the, I’m thinking of the leavened and unleavened bread, you know, that the Bible talks about. Yeah. And even the unleavened bread wouldn’t be all… Phytic acid rich necessarily because they probably would have just ground it yeah or had the

Alison:
Phytase in it completely they would have just ground it and then put it onto a hot stone and cooked it wouldn’t.

Andrea:
Be costing their body that extra effort yeah interesting

Alison:
And of course you know there aren’t many studies on this because really people don’t stand to make a great deal of money by studying this so there aren’t many studies but like i said i’m sure there are a lot more things that we don’t even understand that are being lost in the process of putting flour on a shelf so that’s in my opinion compelling health reasons to mill your own flour and, the reason I chose a mock mill really was partially for health we’ll talk about the types of mills that are available a bit later but the idea of stone milling your own flour just like western price talked about it was freshly stone ground flour takes the idea of milling as far as possible down the health um kind of path because if you stone mill the grain isn’t overly heated during that process so as we know the more you heat things the more likely it is that compounds are going to be killed. And so when you stone-growing flour, you are keeping it cooler than the potential other options, so therefore the grain is going to be less damaged.

Andrea:
I did not know that that was the draw with the stone.

Alison:
Yeah. Interesting. You know, one of the things I did when I researched the mokman was I looked up, you know, how hot does this flour get during the milling process?

Andrea:
Of course you did.

Alison:
I did. I was like, I have to know this.

Andrea:
This is why I just wait for you to buy things, Alison. If Alison buys it,

Alison:
Then I’ll get it. I know the difference between what temperature you will get your flour out of a mock meal compared to what temperature you get your flour out of a Vitamix if you do it that way or if you do it some other way.

Andrea:
Oh, it gets really hot in the Vitamix.

Alison:
It’s important.

Andrea:
Which the Vitamix is fantastic if you actually want to make soup in it. You can actually cook your soup.

Alison:
Yeah, cook your soup. Exactly.

Andrea:
And if you’re in a real pinch, you can grind, you know, a cup of cornmeal or something. But if you do very much flour in there, it’s going to get…

Alison:
Yeah, completely. So those are my health reasons, really, for choosing to purchase a mockmeal. The second reason why you might want to mill at home is for flavour. And I kind of knew that everyone talked about this before I bought the mill. I thought, yeah, well, we’ll just get bread that tastes better as well. That’ll be an extra bonus. That’s how it felt to me. But then, having tasted the bread since getting the meal, it is completely different. I mean…

Alison:
Like seriously and and you can sort of draw a parallel even if you haven’t tried this yourself at home because we we all know what it’s like to have properly fresh food I mean if you’re growing a vegetable carrot in your back garden and you go pull it and bring it in and cook it and compare the flavor of that carrot to vegetables in a plastic bag from a supermarket there is no comparison and we’ve all tried that and kind of know that and and it works the same way with grains.

Alison:
When you make bread with flour that you freshly ground it really is fresh I mean you can keep those grains for years in the state they are and archaeologists have found grains I know on digs and been able to sprout them like you know centuries later so you really you can have those grains in your house and yet have them fresh in the same way as you could just pull a carrot from your garden and the flavor of them when you do that I mean that the two grains that we use as you know mostly in this house are rye and spelt and your rye is that sort of deep rich sweet flavor and it’s even sweeter when you freshly mill it it’s just it’s got more depth it’s got more zing it’s got more sweetness and spelt is well known for being a kind of a nutty flavor and as felt is even nuttier when you when you freshly grind it so it’s like the characteristics of the grain are amplified through freshly grinding it’s just the flavor is amazing you.

Andrea:
You know we both know alice and our listeners know that when you have fresh food that has those extra flavors the flavor actually signals something yeah

Alison:
Completely the flavor.

Andrea:
Isn’t just a chemical additive from a company placed in there that will never expire that’s there to make you think you’re eating something yeah the flavor is the plant telling you something that’s beneficial for you and so if you’re tasting something in the spelt that’s more delicious that means there’s something really good in there that you’re not getting out of your aged flower.

Alison:
Yeah, completely, completely. So number three in our list of why you might want to home mill your flower is economy.

Alison:
And we’ve talked about this several times on the podcast and there are details of it in my spelt book. Generally, if you buy grains they’re cheaper than flour and the good thing about buying grains is that you can buy them in bulk it’s really not very easy to buy flour in bulk before we had the mock meal we did do it we didn’t buy in as much bulk as we did as we do now with grains but we did buy flour in bulk and then we used to take it out put it in separate bags keep it in the freezer I’ve got a tiny freezer so we couldn’t do much at a time and it took up like virtually like half of the room of the freezer um so you can buy flour in bulk but it’s not so easy and also like I said earlier if it’s whole grain and you’re not able to freeze it it’s likely that the fats in that grain are, potentially going to go rancid the longer you leave it whereas grains you can buy in bulk and you can store them for ages and so grains are cheaper to start with and then when you buy 25 kilos which is like 50 pounds for you i think in the states you can get really good deals on them something like that yeah um isn’t it weird.

Andrea:
That once again the best thing for you is actually the most

Alison:
Economic yeah back to 50 ways that’s not.

Andrea:
What we’re told by the media We’re told by the media, you can’t afford to eat really good. It’s too expensive for you. It’s actually the cheapest.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. You have to buy this kombucha from the store that costs like, you know, $9 for a tiny… Bottle and it’s all really sugary no you could.

Andrea:
Just start with you have to buy this at the store

Alison:
Yeah yeah i didn’t even need to go any further than that did i so when you buy grains like that like i said you can store them for ages now we did interview ellie from ellie’s every day who is um someone we love here at the podcast back an episode 42 how to get and grind the best flour for bread in there she shares her storage routine for grains which includes kind of putting them in the freezer so there’s any weevils in them you won’t have problems with that um we we buy them in bulk and we have frozen some of them we haven’t frozen some of them we’re storing them and it’s much much cheaper so my kind of suggestion for listeners there is to look up at wherever you get your grains or wherever you can get your grains locally look up how much the flour costs look up how much the equivalent of grains cost and do a comparison look up then if you buy five times that amount of grains because usually you can buy massive sacks see how much that costs and work out how much different it makes to your bread and then if you’re worried about the cost of the meal.

Alison:
The meal that i’ve bought i mean basically i’m not i’m not going to buy another meal for the rest of my life that’s my plan so think about how the cost of that meal then works out over you know five years a decade 15 years of buying bulk grains rather than flour and and really it’s a no-brainer it is yeah.

Andrea:
Gabriel probably i mean unless he moves farther away from you and he wants to grind his sorry you won’t even have to buy milk yeah you can

Alison:
Just keep using yours yeah exactly he can he can be using it it’s an heirloom my family heirloom so the last one um again kind of a bit like the the flavor this was a kind of an aside when i bought my mill, i didn’t really think about it before the mock mill but i did feel like, Deep down, there was a drive for me to get closer and closer to my food. That’s what my journey’s been since I started eating ancestrally. That’s what both of us have been. That’s why you have your farm part of it and why you’re going to develop your garden and why you’ve got animals. So we both know and listeners know that the closer we get to our food source, the more fulfilling and satisfied we become.

Alison:
And seeing those grains being turned into flour by me whenever I want in my kitchen just connects me more and more to the grain and the soil that grew the grain. And the farmer that grew the grain it makes me question more it’s like you know getting out of a supermarket when you start to do that you start to question well where where did my meat come from and I’ve bought this meat from this farmer how is he growing it what is he feeding his animals, the same thing has happened with the grains I feel when I’m grinding those grains for my family’s I feel a much deeper sense of contentment over changing that grain into flour and I feel a connection with the food stuff and how it’s going to nourish our bodies. I feel a connection with the grain more and I start to think about the grass it’s you know grown as and how that looks in fields and what it does to the soil and the crop rotation and all of these things that I just have more easy to avoid when you buy flour and on the flip side the deeper you get into them the more.

Alison:
Gratitude springs forth the more um desire to connect springs forth and I think that feels to me like a really big part of milling at home it kind of makes something more circular and I like that.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s beautiful.

Alison:
So, yeah, those are the four things. So we had health, which was most important for me, flavour, economy and connection. And then I’ve got something that is quite funny that I wanted to share, Andrew, which I told you about before we started, which I’ve shared before.

Andrea:
Yeah, you told me this and it shook me. Yeah. I was so, so surprised.

Alison:
So everyone knows really listening. I mean, this is what our ancestors did. There weren’t great big steel roller mills grinding grain, you know, centuries ago. Our ancestors used, first of all, as you were saying, mortar and pestle to grind grain into flour. And then querns came into use. And querns were stone mills that were rotary and hand turned. So they had, some of them had a kind of a handle on the top, which you turned in a circle with one stone on top of the other. Some of them had animals that did that. So querns came into use in the third century before Christ. And it’s really interesting if you dive back into the use of querns in those societies, it was mostly the women that did the grinding. So sometimes two of them would sit opposite each other. So because the querns were quite big and they needed one person to be able to kind of pull the handle from one side and the other one to take it when it went right over to the other side of the circle and there’s a quote here that prehistoric women that lived in central Europe during the first 5,500 years of farming had stronger upper arm muscles than living female rowing champions.

Alison:
And I just think that’s amazing. You know, we see rowers and the female rowers and we think about the training that they do every day with their arms turning those oars. And yet that was normal for women who were living in prehistoric times, probably because of querns, because it was their job to grind the grain. And they needed to do it a lot because you’ve got to turn a quern quite a few times to get the grain out to make a loaf of bread and um yeah it is part of the physicality and their health as well which i thought was it’s just amazing that statistic.

Andrea:
And the fact that they compared it to the rowers is interesting because i actually had looked up female elite rowers after you

Alison:
Oh yeah and.

Andrea:
Um i read on a college website that rowing is considered one of the most physically demanding endurance sports in the world wow

Alison:
So making querns was more demanding than the most physically demanding endurance sports in the world wow.

Andrea:
Hey you washing the dishes then there you’ve heard allison and i talk over and over about her love of rye sourdough bread well i might actually call it an obsession but that’s neither here nor there now you can make allison’s rye sourdough in your own kitchen with her as your teacher and she’s a really good teacher rye is economical it’s delicious and full of nutrients and low in gluten there’s a reason Wyatt has been a darling of bread bakers for centuries. Make it into sourdough as Allison will show you in her course, Rye Sourdough Bread, Mastering the Basics. And you’ve got an amazing, tasty, and nutritious staple in your kitchen.

Andrea:
It’s traditional and it’s nutritional. In this course, you’ll learn everything there is to know about how she creates and maintains her rye sourdough starter all about whole grain sourdough rye including the key differences between baking with rye and wheat how to make two loaves an everyday rye sandwich bread and a delicious russian style dark rye loaf and what to do with your sourdough discard including video walkthroughs for sourdough pancakes and a tasty sweet spiced cake head to www.ancestralkitchen.com slash rye

Alison:
Okay, so let’s talk about mill options now. Andrew, do you want to clarify anything or stop me before I just go into this one?

Andrea:
No, I’m really curious about this part because this is the aspect that I actually know the least about. Okay. It’s the choices between mills.

Alison:
So I really want to hear what I’m saying. Okay, so before I even had anything that really could grind grain, I used to blend grain. So what I used to do, I made buckwheat bread back in the day and I used to soak the buckwheat and leave it overnight. And then I used to put it in a food processor or a blender and just blend it up and make a batter with it. Oh, like what? Yeah, and make a batter bread from it. So, you know, you can do that if you’re just kind of starting out and you want to play around with whole grains. But you will get batter so you can use it for pancakes or you can make a kind of a batter style bread. Generally if you want to purchase a mill to grind your grain dry.

Alison:
The choices that you’re going to have put in front of you are an impact mill, the types of mill, impact mill, a roller mill or a stone mill and you’ll see those terms kind of put around in all of the meals that you look up. So impact meals use impact, that’s why they’re called impact meals, to break up grains. So they smash grains against the side of a container in order to make them into flour. So an example of this is the NutriMil and that one is small and it’s cheaper than the other options of roller or stone mill. So that’s one of the benefits of it. But it does grind up at high temperatures. A bit like you were saying, Andrea, you know, you can use a Vitamix. That’s a similar kind of idea. The Vitamix is using blades in it and it’s smashing the grain against the side and smashing them against the blades. And it will absolutely pulverize your grain into a flour but in doing so it will increase the temperature of your grain but if you just want to have a go and start that’s it or if you really don’t have any space at all and you want something very small you’re not making bread perhaps so often that’s a good option.

Alison:
Now, so that’s an impact mill. A roller mill is rollers that are aligned together with a very small gap in between them and the grain goes in between those rollers and it is squashed. So we actually do have a roller mill here in this house and that’s our Marcato Marga. I bought that about five years ago and we use that a lot for rolling oats so a roller mill you can if you get one that has different variations on it you can change that gap between the the space between the two rollers so you can say I just want for example to roll my oats and then you leave a slightly larger gap between the two rollers by changing the settings you can put your oats through that and it will just flatten them. Or on the Mercato Marga, we can then change the settings to be a thinner gap and put those oats through again and they will disintegrate literally after a few goes.

Alison:
We used to grind rye in the Mercato Marga, but it doesn’t grind as finely as it would do in a stone mill, for example. Right. Are you just putting it over and over? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So our Mark Arte Margaret is hand crank. You can get engines for them.

Andrea:
Go Rob.

Alison:
Which you put on. But yeah, there you go. So Rob used to literally put that rye grain in it and put it on the wider setting and then take it all out, put it back in, put it on a smaller setting, put it through again. And then take it all out, put it on a smaller setting, put it through again. And even after those kind of three goes, we would be left with really quite coarsely ground rye flour.

Andrea:
And a half an afternoon would be kind of messy.

Alison:
And strong arm muscles. Good memories.

Andrea:
Good memories.

Alison:
Yeah. Well, he used to read when he was doing it to Gabriel and I.

Andrea:
Oh, I love that.

Alison:
So we used to do it in the evening and like make a big thing of it. He would set up, you know, something, a book on the side so he could see it quite easily. And then he’d just read away and grind away. So, yeah, not so good if you don’t have strong arms like me.

Alison:
But if you do and you have spare time and you want a kind of real hand experience of it, then that’s an option. Now, it’s perhaps slightly confusing because in an industrial setting, there are roller mills. And most flour that you find on the supermarket shelf today has been ground in a roller mill. Roller mills were introduced in the 1800s and replaced stone mills and they basically did that because they could grind more flour and make more money and get as much white flour out of possible as possible out of the grains. So it’s, If you are buying flour, I know we’re talking about milling now, but if you are buying flour, if you want to be sure that you’re getting the best possible flour that you can, look for a packet that says stone ground. If it doesn’t say that, absolutely, positively, it’s been roller milled, which means its temperatures have been taken up. And probably if it’s whole grain and roller milled, it’s actually been, there’s been white flour and the bran’s been added back into it because the roller mills all have sieves and separators and And I think I’d probably just feel absolutely depressed if I went to a roller mill and looked at a roller mill factory.

Andrea:
That’s like milk, Alison.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
That’s the same thing with milk. They don’t actually sell you whole milk.

Alison:
They put it back in.

Andrea:
Separate it and then put back together.

Alison:
There we go.

Andrea:
Very scientific.

Alison:
Yeah, but not very real. So that’s roller mills. And then the third one, so we had impact roller. We’re on to stone mills now. So stone mills are mills that use stones to grind the flour. And my mock mill that I’m using is a stone mill. So the first thing that I did when I got the mock mill was literally take it apart. Because, you know, why not? I wanted to see what was inside. And it’s actually really easy to take apart. You don’t have to take it apart very much afterwards. I haven’t taken it apart since then. because even if you make a doozy and put something in it that is a bit too sticky and shouldn’t have gone through it you can usually just put a dry grain through the hopper and run it again and it cleans itself so I haven’t had to open it since then but I opened it when it first arrived because I wanted to look at it and it is two very precise round beautiful heavy stones that are sitting on a kind of a spring, one on top of another.

Alison:
And then the mock mill has a lever on the side, which has numbers on it that go from one to 10. And you slide that lever from numbers one to 10. And as you do that, those two stones get further and further apart. So if I want to have my flour as thin and finely ground as possible, I’m going to use one. But if I want to grind a grain that has for example more fat like oats I’m not going to put it on one because probably that fat’s going to clog up in between that very tiny gap so I’ll put it on five maybe a bit further if I want to have my flour a bit less finely ground I can push that lever back as well but basically a stone mill even though it’s small I mean the mock mill is not big it is two stones so it’s exactly the same technology as that quern that our prehistoric ancestors were using but it’s just been packaged in this way that we can use it in a modern kitchen so as i said the the stone mills um mock mills the one that i have como are another famous make of stone mills, they have temperatures that keep the grain lower so they don’t heat it up as much.

Alison:
So those are the types of grain mills, the different ways of grinding. I wanted to talk a little bit about the actual machines that you can get for your home kitchen.

Alison:
So go back to a kind of another example perhaps you have a kitchen aid in your kitchen and you’re very happy with it you can buy an attachment for that kitchen aid that will grind grain for you um i remember when i looked at this as an option i don’t have a kitchen aid um but you know i i wanted to explore all the options i remember reading that you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a powerful KitchenAid, one of the more powerful ones because grinding grain is an intensive task and you could blow the motor on your KitchenAid if you don’t have a really kind of expensive one. Yeah. So that’s an example of an attachment. And I think some of the other food processors have attachments that can grind grain for you. So, yeah, go on.

Andrea:
I remember, right, Alison, we asked in Discord how many people have the KitchenAid attachment, didn’t we? Yeah. And a couple of people said, I have it and I don’t like it. I don’t think it got rave reviews.

Alison:
Okay. Okay.

Andrea:
And maybe it’s, I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have the, you know, if you have a standard KitchenAid model, it’s probably not beefy enough. Or if they just didn’t like the grind that came out. But it didn’t seem like people were mad about the attachment.

Alison:
Yeah, I think I remember Diana saying that, actually. So, yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, and I don’t remember where the conversation exactly happened, but it was something where we concluded that, you know, if you have something that you’re doing quantity of, you need the tool that’s for the thing.

Alison:
Yeah, I agree. so other than attachment the type of meal you can buy for your home for your kitchen is a standalone meal so some standalone meals are impact meals so the NutriMill Classic is an impact standalone meal some standalone meals are stone like the mock meal so I love the mock meal because of stone ground benefits that you get from it but you know wherever you are in your journey if you want to move forward then it’s you know as we know we go for whatever we are able to move on to at that point and so you know for years and years I was using shop bought flour I was able to purchase a muck mill but if you have access to a nutramill or you have access to a attachment for your kitchen aid and you want to have a go and you want to work with that until you’re able to save up and afford to buy a stone mill then then do that each of those um movements along the path is taking you further in your bread journey which is a wonderful thing in my book for sure okay any questions on kind of those types and those ways of milling andrea before i move on to talking about my meal.

Andrea:
Um, no, I think that’s very helpful because, again, I didn’t really know much about the impact or stone ground difference. Although I did hear you and Ali talk about it, but I don’t know why other than that it sounds cooler.

Alison:
It sounds cooler too, doesn’t it? Which I guess literally is cooler.

Andrea:
But good to know. Yeah. So, yeah, keep going.

Alison:
Okay, so what I want to do now is talk about my meal and why I chose it and the good things about it and what you can do. I do need to know this. So I have a mock meal 100. Mock meals have various types of meals in speed and the type of housing. And my one has the vegetable cellulose housing and the 100 in the title signifies that it can grind 100 grams, which is just over four ounces of grain in a minute. They also have a 200, which can go twice the speed. But I was like, I don’t mind. I’m happy waiting for my flour to come out. So I have the 100. The 100 is cheaper than the 200. So I, in the last six months, I absolutely love the Mock Mill. It’s just, it’s, it’s so easy. It’s like I said, I’ve never had to open it. It’s so clean, even if you mess up and put the wrong thing in, which I’ve done a few times, there’s no fuss to it at all. Literally. It’s, it’s so simple. You have your grain, take the lid off the hopper, you turn the mill on you select the right number that you want which usually is one for me you pour the grain in comes out the other end just got a bowl to catch it at the other end.

Alison:
It’s really lovely to look at as well. When I first bought it, I have a tiny kitchen, literally a tiny kitchen. When I first bought the mock meal, I thought this is going to be something that we swap in and out from the workspace because that’s what we do with stuff because we really don’t have any room. We have storage space downstairs and then we swap things out. So sometimes we’ve got the food processor out. Sometimes we’ve got the slow cooker out. Sometimes I’ve got the dehydrator out. And I thought that the mock mill would become part of that kind of rotation, that we just get it out when we needed it and then put it in a space away. But it has stayed on my counter since I bought it six months ago. And that’s partially because it’s small. And it’s partially because it’s lovely to look at, because I don’t like looking at things that are ugly. And it’s not. It’s beautiful. But partially also because I just use it all the time, literally.

Alison:
If we were to take it off my counter and put it somewhere and then bring it back, I would have to be doing that all the time. So I’m using it to grind rye to put with my porridge. I’m using it for non-gluten grains. I’m using it, you’ll hear a bit later, I’ll explain what I use it for. But I’m using it all the time. I use it much more than I thought I would. And i’m really happy for it to stay on the counter it’s you want to say andrea and just interrupt me interrupt away no.

Andrea:
I’m just saying nice i mean i know you don’t even have a counter

Alison:
Yeah exactly yeah i’ve.

Andrea:
Seen it so i

Alison:
Know there’s a video that’s pretty impressive in the treasure of patreons that i took of my kitchen just to actually prove how tiny my kitchen was and that you could cook ancestrally in such a small space so yeah yeah.

Andrea:
In case anybody listening doesn’t know nobody who listens to the podcast is allowed to use the excuse i don’t have a big kitchen yeah therefore i can’t because allison has a corner

Alison:
Exactly a table exactly so um yeah it’s also really versatile that’s the other thing that i meant i wanted to say it’s really easy to switch that grain size you can just literally turn the lever from 10 to 1 and then actually when it’s on 10 you can unscrew the lever bring it back to 1 and then push it another 10 steps out so you can make the the um grind really really wide it’s so so versatile Thank you. Wow, that’s – so.

Andrea:
Like, if you wanted to do corn, could you do corn in it?

Alison:
That’s a really good question. I don’t know that. I feel like I should have the Mark Mill book with me now. That’s the one thing I haven’t looked. Yeah, there’s a book, yeah. Tells you all what you can grind and what numbers to do it on.

Andrea:
Well, okay, what do you grind in it?

Alison:
Yeah, okay. Unfortunately, not corn yet. I feel like I have to go and try that now. Um so spelt and rye um listeners to the podcast will know that um i have written a book for the podcast um spelt sourdough every day which includes um i think 11 of my wonderful spelt recipes and that’s up on the podcast website so i grind my spelt in there i also grind rye again listeners to the podcast have probably heard the um us chat about my rye sourdough course mastering the basics which is over at the fermentation school i’m doing those all the time then as i said oats we grind our oats in it not the same as rolling them so i’m rolling them in the macato margo the hand roller mill to get the oats that you kind of are used to seeing on the shelf you know flattened oats you can also grind oats and traditionally until roller mills came in so traditionally in scotland all oats were ground into you know a coarse flour or a medium flour they weren’t rolled rolled oats were not invented until the 1800s hey really did you not know that.

Andrea:
How have I known you this long and I can’t know that?

Alison:
Maybe you don’t know that. Yeah.

Andrea:
Maybe you’ve told me before and I forgot. Maybe.

Alison:
What? Maybe, yeah. So all traditional oats were eaten in Scotland as oatmeal, which means a meal, like, you know, a flour.

Andrea:
Okay, everybody who’s read, you know, all these old George MacDonald books and stuff, now you have to re-picture all those bowls of porridge.

Alison:
They’re not.

Andrea:
And get it right in your head.

Alison:
Wasn’t flakes yeah so i do oats in there um i do millet and sorghum because i make a gluten and lectin free bread regularly we eat that almost every day i do brown rice i’ve lined tins with brown rice flour quite a lot and i put brown rice in pancake mixes i grind buckwheat which um you can, it’s high in phytase and you can add to oats to neutralize the phytocase instead of rye if you are gluten free. And then very often I…

Andrea:
But they’d have to be fresh.

Alison:
Freshly ground, exactly. So very often I’ll freshly grind buckwheat and I’ll just add it to my oats and then soak those oats. I found I’ve made pancakes quite a lot more since I’ve had the mock meal because literally I’ll just open the cupboard and I’ll seal it, I’ve got millet, I’ve got buckwheat, I’ve got this, I’ve got that and I can grind it. Just then and there, it’s really easy. I often grind a lot of flour or more flour. I’m not particularly bothered about weighing it. And then I’ll just have containers and I’ll keep the flour in the fridge after I’ve ground it, which I’ll do for a week. I grind the flour for my sourdough starter. And that’s just simple. You know, I only need a little bit. Well, I only get a few grains out. And I grind that and then I’m refreshing my starter with it. So lots of stuff. Yeah. Go on.

Andrea:
Yeah. No, that’s a lot. Yeah. And I’m also picturing that if you had a ritual, you know, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, teff combo that you always made, you could just pre-weigh and mix your whole grains in a jar. And then just, you know, and if you’re doing things by weight anyways, not volume, then if you’re weighing grains, that’s the same weight of flour you’ll have at the end. So you could just weigh out your portions, right?

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:
Do you sieve the flour that comes from the…

Alison:
No, I haven’t. You could, but I’ve never sieved the flour. I think, I just, I love the fact that the whole of it’s in there and I know it’s been, it’s completely fresh and that bran and that germ has been just cracked just then. So I’ve, I’ve never really felt the need to sieve it. And it is kind of a faff, as we would say over here to sieve. So no.

Andrea:
I mean, you have to basically flap flower around.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Andrea:
That’s waiting to happen. Especially because our kids love to help.

Alison:
Exactly. And then it takes twice as long and it goes everywhere. Right. In our hair too. You can do other grains. I’ve never done quinoa amaranth in them, in the mock mill, but you can. You can grind spices in it. What? Then if you were worried about the smell kind of transferring you just put a little bit of brown rice through to clean the stones afterwards i have ground chia in it chia seed and use that to thicken things and i do know you can do legumes in it so you just turn that lever um to further than 10 in the way i think ellie’s got a video on her channel that shows that um but literally you turn the lever to 10 unscrew it put it back to one screw it up turn it to 10 again and you’re basically on 20 and you can crack legumes in the stones that way so I mean I I I’m sure you can do corn in it I haven’t looked but I’m sure you can I haven’t found grain that I want to grind that I can’t grind in it and I haven’t exploited everything it can do yet so it’s just it’s a wonderful piece of machinery.

Alison:
How do you feel about our food world? Do you want to see change like we do? If so, head over to patreon.com forward slash ancestral kitchen podcast and help support us to get this work out as far and wide as we can. To say thank you, we’ve got a host of extra ancestral food material to share with you. You can connect with us more deeply via our patron exclusive podcasts, our after show chats our dedicated forum and our ancestral food get-togethers and there’s a library of downloads that will support you in your own kitchen, by joining you’ll be really helping us to continue making this podcast and to focus on having a bigger impact reaching more people making a greater difference so we can move together towards the future food world we all want to see. We’ve got four levels of support to suit different pockets. Check out www.patreon.com forward slash ancestral kitchen podcast for all the details.

Alison:
So if listeners would like to purchase a mock meal, I meant to say this in the previous section um we are um we have a kind of an affiliate setup with mock mill so you can go and um visit their site via my site and i’ll put a link in the show notes i think um let me just look at my notes here because i do have it i think it’s ancestral kitchen forward slash mill, and if you go there this was.

Andrea:
The perfect this was the perfect sponsor for the podcast because you basically you Told them, we’re going to talk about you no matter what, so you can send us a link if you want. But you are already bound and determined on doing this episode. It’s like, well,

Alison:
Might as well.

Andrea:
Send us a link. So it was awesome that they did.

Alison:
We have that link, which will give you, if you click on that, if you go to that page, ancestralkitchen.com forward slash mill, then you will find pictures of my mill and details of why I chose it. And if you click on any of the links in there that take you to mock meal, if you then go ahead and decide you want to take the plunge and get a meal like mine, then the podcast gets a little bit of a help, which is wonderful because it just helps us buy microphones and keep the shows rolling. Okay.

Andrea:
So, yeah, I just double checked. It is ancestral kitchen dot com slash meal.

Alison:
Thank you for checking that. just ancestral kitchen we’ll put that in the show notes and yeah make sure that as well.

Alison:
Okay um so we are almost done now um we have two things still to talk about and one of them we are going to i think shunt into an after show for the patrons because we are i’m looking at the clock i’m almost at time so i want to talk about two things the first one is how milled flour is different to store-bought flour and how to work with it and then I think for the after show for the patrons I will talk about a question that I’m asked a lot which is how can I convert recipes I see online for bread flour to use my whole grain flour good one so let’s um let’s talk about the differences between milled flour and shop-bought flour first and what I wanted to say was that this is an area that, excuse me.

Alison:
That I have worked with people one-on-one with because it’s something that if you’re not used to using home mill flour and you’ve used white shop-bought flour before, it’s quite a transition to move across and sometimes people want some hand-holding. So I do have sourdough mentoring available if people want to come and work with me and open their kitchen up to my kitchen i will put a link in the show notes for that as well and i have a troubleshooting one-off option um where we could just have one call together or i also have a package of four sessions where i could walk you through the whole process of making whole grain sourdough.

Alison:
Okay, so what’s the difference between shop-bought flour and home meal flour? The first one is it’s more thirsty. It needs more water. And it’s very difficult for me to say how much because it’s a case-by-case kind of question. You need to experiment with it. I would say if you’re starting out, put somewhere between 10% to 15% more water in. But do start with less rather than more because you know you can add water sometimes it’s slightly more difficult to do that when the bread’s more fully formed but you can you can’t take that water away though although you obviously you can save that loaf if it’s too um if it’s too over hydrated you can put it in a tin and it’ll still taste great so it might take you a few goes to understand okay this is how much more water my flour needs now I’m milling it at home in my mock meal rather than this is how much my shop bought flour used each time you do it write it down because I mean I always forget to write it down I guess you’re like that Andrea so you do something and you’re like well I don’t know how I did it I can’t remember how much I put in I just put a teaspoon that was really good yeah exactly so each time you do it make an effort to say right I used.

Andrea:
I don’t know,

Alison:
10% more water. And it still was a bit kind of hard when I was trying to stretch and fold it. So maybe I’ll try. Through your food scale. 10%. Yeah, exactly. I should take note of it myself and do it more often because I don’t.

Andrea:
You are a strong advocate for using a food scale in the kitchen because of things like this,

Alison:
Right? Yeah.

Andrea:
It’s like, how do you know if you’re just eyeballing it that you did 10%?

Alison:
You don’t. I think it’s on a scale. You know, baking is an art, but it is a science too. And if we can just make those science bits down pat and have scales to test them and write them down, then we can express ourselves through the art of baking rather than messing up through the science. That’s so beautiful. thank you i just yes i love baking so um the other thing about um your freshly milled flour is i would say that it’s a weaker flour generally than the shop-bought flour because the gluten is less developed flour that is left on a shelf the gluten becomes more developed i can’t think of a better word pronounced so that’s that’s not a problem if you’re making something like rye of course because rye doesn’t rely on a gluten network to rise but if you are baking with a bread that predominantly does rely on a gluten network to rise like wheat you might need to work that dough more in order to develop that gluten which is weaker in freshly milled flour you also could potentially do an autolyse on the flour which will hydrate it more fully, that’s basically just mixing flour your flour and your water together and leaving it and that then might help you as you start to bring the dough together with all the other ingredients.

Andrea:
Is that what that word means?

Alison:
Yeah, it does. It’s a posh word for a really simple process. It’s just you put your water with your flour and you leave it.

Alison:
It’s hydrating your flour so it’s fully hydrated because some flours take longer to hydrate and some bread processes benefit from having a flour that’s more fully hydrated. And so you can just leave your flour and your water. Literally overnight sometimes I leave one in the fridge and very often then when you take it out it’s like a it’s like a fully formed dough so i’ll literally spread my sourdough starter and my salt on it as a dough and then start to fold it in and roll it together and work it and work it and work it that way rather than putting everything all at once yeah that’s sort of least last thing last thing about um freshly meal flour is it will probably be more active and I’m not sure of the science on this whether more kind of goodies in the fermentation stay on the grain rather than being lost when it’s ground but you will probably have to watch your fermentation whole grain bread can be more active anyway because a lot of the goodies are on the bran but freshly milled whole grain bread particularly can be extremely active so make sure when you’re doing that swap to start with that you you’re watching your fermentation because it’s probably going to over ferment rather than under ferment if you don’t.

Alison:
So, yeah, those are the main differences between home meal flour and shop bought flour. What we’re going to do is the patron question, which we can’t squeeze in here because we’re at the hour, which was how can I convert recipes I see online for bread flour to use my whole grain flour? We will, after we’ve stopped recording, we will continue and make an after show addressing that question. And so if you would like to get access to that and all of our other after shows and come join us on Discord, which is wonderful, and access our private podcast, you can come join us on Patreon, which is patreon.com forward slash Ancestral Kitchen podcast. Okay, any questions before I wrap up, Andrea?

Andrea:
Wow, I just love it all. And I don’t know I’ve been so fascinated watching Ellie and then now watching you and you know I have an old mill but I know now I mean I knew before that it got the flour pretty hot so I don’t know what type of mill it is I could probably look it up still probably better than a store bought one that was also heated But I also know it doesn’t get it very fine. And that’s always kind of an irritation when I’m baking and makes it less everybody’s favorite. So I’m thinking now… That, you know, getting a better mill will probably be a part of our journey. And I am just glad I don’t need to go research all the brands because you did it for me.

Alison:
Yeah, you know, I kind of, I give credit to Ellie there because, you know, she did the original research and I love what she’s up to and what she does. And it was her.

Andrea:
She is as deep dive as you.

Alison:
Exactly. I knew like you like you said about me you know you you feel like you can trust me in the research that I’ve done I feel the same about Ellie and so when the question came up as to what meal I was going to get you know when I realized that this was the time and and I wanted to then really there wasn’t any question in my head because I knew that I wanted a mock meal because I’d I’d seen Ellie do what she’s done with it and I know the research she put into it and you know I did do the research and I looked at Como and I looked at Mocmo and I looked at other meals and yeah she’s right and I have not looked back I mean I have not regretted that purchase for a moment.

Andrea:
You rave to me about it all the time so I know that you love this new little companion in your kitchen.

Alison:
I do I do.

Andrea:
And And it’s something, grain touches a lot of aspects of yours and my meals.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Like it turns up in a lot of places. So I feel like if there is somewhere to kind of spend a little no, use a grain pun, it would be on this.

Alison:
I think that pun was so great. We may have to title the episode with it.

Andrea:
Okay. Well, thank you, Alison, for all your intensive research and also reaching out to Mock Mill to get us the connection with them and everything. This is phenomenal.

Alison:
Yeah, indeed. I have learned a lot today. Wonderful. I’m really glad and I hope that the listeners have to. Do reach out to me if you’re listening and you have questions. You know, I’m sure we’re going to do more episodes on bread and milling and flour and everything in the future. So do feel free. probably we.

Andrea:
Um alice and sometimes you know these episodes end up sparking more conversation in the discord so what i should do is going to make a thread

Alison:
Yeah um.

Andrea:
For the episode because some of these like super specific episodes are really good to have a thread on and then everybody who has mills

Alison:
Can come and comment in there and come and ask questions yeah i agree so yeah if you’re thinking about it i would totally recommend home milling i like i said i haven’t regretted than what we’ll purchase at all i just absolutely love it and if you if you want to do use our links it won’t cost you any more but you’ll be helping us continue to get in your ears and bring this podcast to you thank you very much andrea all.

Andrea:
Right next time

Alison:
Allison bye for now bye, thank you so much for listening we’d love to continue the conversation Come find us on Instagram, Andrea’s at farmandhearth and Alison’s at…

Music:
Music

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