The Ancestral Kitchen Podcast Guide to Milling Your Own Flour
Here at Ancestral Kitchen Podcast, we love milling our own flour for bread (and pancakes, and muffins, and pastry, and biscuits and cakes!). There’s just no comparison; freshly-milled flour is better on all fronts.
We receive lots of milling questions, so decided to put together a podcast guide to milling your own flour.
Why mill your own flour for bread?
Freshly-milling flour is what our ancestors did:
Our ancestors stored grain, milling it as and when they needed it. It’s only recently, since the advent of commercial mills that we’ve been able to mill flour in quantity and store it. That’s a tiny window of time when you consider we’ve been eating grains for many tens of thousands of years.
Our ancestors spent much time and energy milling flour – using, at first, a set of two hand-held stones, and, later, large manually-worked stone querns. As archaeologists tell us, it was women’s work and heavy toil:
“Prehistoric women that lived in Central Europe during the first 5,500 years of farming had stronger upper arms than living female rowing champions.” (1)
These days, we don’t need to expend so much time and energy to have fresh flour! We can be inspired by ancestral wisdom and yet use the devices developed by modern enthusiasts to grind our grain healthily and easily.
Freshly-milled flour is healthier:
Freshly-ground grains are so much more nutritious than store-bought flour.
Weston A. Price in his ground-breaking work, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, details how the healthy grain-eating communities he visited freshly-ground their grain.
It was when these communities turned to store-bought white flour that their health began to decline.
Scientific studies comparing freshly-ground flour to store-bought flour are few and far between. But the results of the 1970 one carried out by Bernasek floored us:
Five groups of rats were fed a diet that was made up of 50% flour or bread:
- Group 1 consumed fresh stone-ground flour.
- Group 2 was fed bread made with this flour.
- Group 3 consumed the same flour as group 1 but after 15 days of storage.
- Group 4 was fed bread made with the flour fed to group 3.
- Group 5 consumed white flour.
Four generations in, only the rats fed fresh stone-ground flour or bread made with it had maintained their fertility. The rats who ate white flour and the rats fed stone-ground flour that had been stored for 15 days (or bread made with it) became infertile. (2)
Here’s what we know happens to commercially-ground flour, as it’s packaged, as it’s transported, as it stands on store-shelves, as it sits in our kitchen cupboards:
- Vitamins and minerals are lost
- Important compounds like phytase are denatured
- Fats, when exposed to the air, oxidise producing free radicals
And, as with all these things, you can bet there’s a whole lot else going on that we don’t yet know.
We have the choice to purchase whole grain and freshly-grind our flour, and when we do this, we ensure we’re getting (and serving to others) the healthiest form of bread we can, just like our ancestors did.
Freshly-milled flour can be much more economical
Let’s talk a little more about buying your own grains. Because it’s not just for health that we might want to freshly-mill our flour; it can also work out much easier on the pocket.
When you buy grain, not flour, you can purchase in bulk, rest assured that your food isn’t going to degrade. Whole grains are designed, by nature, to be stored. Archaeologists have found, and successfully sprouted, grains on many sites.
Buying grains and storing them at home means we can take advantage of bulk-buying discounts.
For example Azure Standard’s hard red wheat flour, when purchased in small packs (to avoid it going bad in our cupboards) is $2.01 per pound. The same grain, purchased as a 50 pound bag of berries is $0.82 a pound. Even if you’re only making two small loaves a week, that’s still a saving of over $123 a year. (3)
If you’d like to add a small rye loaf to your weekly food, you’d add a saving of another $100 to your food bill. (4)
We know, from listening to you, that saving money whilst eating well is top priority. Here’s a way, even taking into account the purchase of a mill, you can!
Freshly-milled flour tastes amazing!
We know what it’s like to have really fresh food; imagine just-pulled carrots from your garden compared to the plastic-bagged version from a supermarket. They are incomparable!
The same flavour differences are true of grains, which taste amazing ( in fact, like a different food) when freshly-ground.
Spelt breads are even nuttier, rye is even sweeter, buckwheat is even earthier. All the best properties of the grains, the reasons why we love them, are amplified by the simple step of grinding the grain freshly.
Freshly-milling flour connects us with our food.
Grinding our own grains makes us both feel more connected to our grains, the soil and farmers that grew them. We value our bread more, we waste less, we care even more about the impact our choices have on the world. All good things!
How to grind your own flour:
When considering what mill to buy, the choice can be overwhelming. There are stand mixer attachments, manual, hand-crank mills and compact, impact mills.
We’ve tried many of them and the best option we have found is the Mockmill.
Why do we love the Mockmill?
It’s a stonemill
The Mockmill uses the same technology that our ancestors used to grind grain. Inside it are two grooved ceramic corundum grinding stones – the top one rotates against the bottom one to grind the grain.
Stone milling happens at a low temperature and preserves many more of the nutrients in the grain than other options like impact or roller milling.
It’s easy to use and easy to clean
The stones in a Mockmill are powered by electricity, meaning there’s nothing to crank by hand!
The Mockmill 100 (the one that Alison has) can grind up to 100g (3.5oz) a minute; the Mockmill 200 up to 200g (7oz) a minute.
Plug the mill in, select the grind you desire by using the lever, put a bowl underneath to collect the flour, turn it on and then tip your whole grains into the top. It’s as easy as that.
There’s no need to clean the mill after using it. We wipe down the covering every few weeks, only doing a bigger clean every six months or so.
It’s simple and robust
Opening up the Mockmill and looking inside, you see how simple the mechanism is. There aren’t loads of parts or multiple buttons/levers to go wrong.
And it’s robust, coming with a 6-year guarantee.
It has an easily-adjustable sliding scale
The Mockmill has a lever on the side with which controls how close together the stones are. Choosing the first setting, the stones are almost touching and you can produce very finely-ground flour. Sliding the lever through the ascending numbers, the resulting grind will be coarser.
We use the finest grind for most breads, but with the stones further apart we can crack grain for more interestingly-textured porridges and bread inclusions.
It’s lovely to look at
Both the Mockmills, the 100 and the 200, come with two different housing options. The beautiful ‘Lino’ range offers a wood surround and the standard model, a more economical choice, is made of an environmentally-friendly, plant-based bio plastic.
Alison thought, when she bought the standard Mockmill 100, she’d want to put it away in a cupboard when it wasn’t being used. But she’s been surprised by how beautiful (and calm) it looks and is happy to leave it sitting out on her counter!
The many ways you can use the Mockmill:
We use the Mockmill to grind all kinds of grains into fine flour for bread-making: spelt, rye, emmer, einkorn and wheat along with gluten-free grains like brown rice, buckwheat and millet.
But freshly-milled flour is not just for making bread. Alison makes all her grain recipes using freshly-milled flour – pastry, pizza, pancakes, scones, biscuits and cakes.
The Mockmill, with its coarser-grind settings, is also great for cracking grains to add to breads such as pumpernickel, or for cracking whole oats or other grains for an interestingly-textured porridge.
You can also grind spices, some seeds and crack or grind legumes using the mill.
If you wish to roll/flake instead of grind (to make, for instance, rolled oats) Mockmill has a dedicated machine, Flake Lovers, which will automatically flake whole oat groats, giving you more nutritious oatmeal.
Should I get the Mockmill 100 or 200?
This depends on how often, and how quickly, you want to grind grain. The Mockmill 100 grinds up to 100g (3.5oz) a minute; the Mockmill 200 up to 200g (7oz) a minute. This means for a 600g (1.3lb) loaf the Mockmill 100 will take 6 minutes to grind flour; the Mockmill 200 will take 3 minutes.
Alison has never noticed a problem waiting for the Mockmill 100 she has to produce flour. There’s always bowls to get out, sourdough starter to prepare and water to measure. Before you know it the flour is done!
The Mockmill 100 can grind 2.5kg (5.5lbs) of grain without needing a break. This means, in practice, that you could grind enough for four 600g (1.3lb) loaves in one batch.
In our opinion, if you’re baking for a family the Mockmill 100 does the job brilliantly. If you’re making more loaves or working professionally then perhaps look into the Mockmill 200 or their other, professional, model.
How to purchase a Mockmill:
You can purchase a Mockmill and support the podcast (without paying anything extra yourself) by using the links on this page to purchase.
If you’re in the US:
View the range of mills in the Mockmill US shop
View the Mockmill 100 (Alison’s mill) in the US shop
(note added February 2025: Mockmill are currently experiencing supply issues and are out of stock of a lot of their mills. You can still order one; your order will be placed in a queue and the mill delivered to you as soon as it is available)
If you’re in the UK:
Buy from Deliver Deli, Mockmill’s partner in the UK
View the Mockmill 100 (Alison’s mill) in the UK shop
If you’re in mainland Europe:
Go to the Mockmill shop by clicking here and use code P2024-AK-03 at checkout to get a 3% discount.
If you’re in Canada, you can buy from the US shop above.
If you’re in Australia or any other part of the world, you can use the mainland Europe link (and discount) above.
For more information on milling, you can listen to us talking about it in this episode: Home-Milling Flour for the Best Bread
1 – https://www.sci.news/othersciences/anthropology/prehistoric-women-stronger-todays-female-athletes-05482.html
2 – https://www.eap.mcgill.ca/publications/EAP35.htm
3 – https://www.azurestandard.com/shop/product/food/flour/whole-wheat/hard-red/bread-flour-100-whole-red-wheat-unifine-organic/8428?package=FL054 and https://www.azurestandard.com/shop/product/food/grains/wheat/hard-red-wheat-berries/hard-red-wheat-organic/11656?package=GR063 (prices accessed Jan 2025)
4 – https://www.azurestandard.com/shop/product/food/flour/rye/dark-rye-flour-unifine-organic/10543?package=FL078 and https://www.azurestandard.com/shop/product/food/grains/rye/whole-berries/rye-grain-organic/10540?package=GR059 (prices accessed Jan 2025)