#133 – Home Milling Q & A

We get lots of questions from supporters and listeners about milling your own flour and thought it was about time we brought them all together a Q&A.

This episode is packed with information:

We start with troubleshooting bread made with freshly milled flour, including:

• why your bread might not be rising as much
• why you might have experienced your bread pancaking
• and why freshly milled flour breads need more water and how best to transition to that

We then go on to talk about sifting, how to do it, and the nutritional effects.

We talk about storing grain, whether we’re personally concerned with the heat that grinding grains at home produces, and then how we store excess flour.

We cover freshly milling gluten-free grains, including a deep dive into oats.

And we talk about all the other things you can use your home mill for, and there are lots of them.

Whether you have a mill or whether you’re just thinking about getting a mill, this episode will bring you something new.

Resources:

Ancestral Kitchen Podcast Guide to Home Milling

The Grain Flavour Wheel Project

Alison’s article on making stone-ground oatmeal in the mockmill

Mockmill Milling Guide

Bread Lasagna

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Hello, Alison. Happy afternoon. I don’t know why I started. I thought you

Alison:
Were going to say happy birthday for tomorrow. I wasn’t ready for that.

Andrea:
Well, I wasn’t. And then I thought, no, wait a minute. It’s not your birthday in podcast time, even though it isn’t. We celebrated your birthday on the last recording. So I threw myself off. Well, hey, happy day. Happy day to you. I guess you’re doing great. I guess you’re doing great. All right. Well, did you eat before we got on today?

Alison:
Yes, yes, yes. We had intentional leftovers made too much yesterday on purpose, made double of faggots. Do you know what faggots are?

Andrea:
No, you’ll have to explain it to me.

Alison:
Faggots are an English dish, which is, I was just talking about the etymology of them yesterday, which is interesting because they’re, originally they were parcels of liver.

Andrea:
Wrapped in fat

Alison:
And you know you can get the same dish in italy and in italy it’s called fagatelli and you understand why it’s called fagatelli oh because liver’s called faggato yeah but why is it called faggot something really similar to fagatelli with the f-a-g-g thing in england when liver’s called liver not faggato anyone who’s into etymology tell me you can tell me the etymology of faggots i’d be great.

Andrea:
We need the researchers

Alison:
Were originally a dish made of liver wrapped in spices and stuff, wrapped in core fat, which is the lacy-like fat which goes around the organs in a pig and in the other animal. Yeah. But modern recipes for faggots tend to have muscle meat in as well, not just liver. And the recipe that I originally based this on was sent to me by Amelia, who’s a supporter in Wales. And the recipe had pork belly and kidney and liver and bacon in. And I didn’t have all those things. Oh, my gosh. So I put the kidney in and the liver in and pork mince and bacon. This time, I didn’t have any bacon. So I just put pork, mince, liver and kidneys in and wrapping it in the cool fat is such fun. It’s that cool fat is so beautiful. Anyone who hasn’t worked with it can get it. It’s just, it’s amazing. It’s so thin and yet it wraps the little balls of your kind of meatballs really well and keeps them together. So, you know, I don’t use eggs because Gable has problems with eggs. And so I’m sometimes struggled to keep my meatballs together because I haven’t got eggs in. but with cool fat you can do whatever you want because you just rub them in this cool so.

Andrea:
You are you cutting it into little pieces and well

Alison:
I kind of do it all along i open up a bit put it on the board put the ball of meat in the middle and then i think kind of can be about that much and i get the scissors and i try it around and then i shape it around sometimes i just kind of tear it a bit with my hands um and then i put those in the oven um and last time i made a stock with trotters from the same pig um and i then cooked a lot of onions up and reduced it made a really really oniony trotter stock to go to the top gabe wasn’t too keen on that last time he said it was too sweet didn’t like it and you know if you put a lot of onions in something like that yeah french onion soup it tends to go really quite sweet so really sweet i just got a cube of pork stock out of the freezer and thickened it with some fine oatmeal. Um that’s stone ground oats and then poured that over the top put it in the oven and we had it yesterday then today i heated up the half that was left um actually in a saucepan with some of a liquid in the bottom and i just threw a load of cauliflower on the top raw and so the the things that heated through and the cauliflower cooked and the sauce was lovely and warm and um we had that with bread i had um gluten-free bread rob had rye bread and gabriel had spelt bread it’s like bread factory oh.

Andrea:
My gosh three little bears with all your different breads

Alison:
So um it’s amazing it was delicious if you look online for a recipe for faggots you’ll find it so and then i’m.

Andrea:
Totally totally marveling it’s never occurred to me to cut it up and wrap small pieces of meat in it i mean this is just

Alison:
You could use it just i.

Andrea:
Guess so yeah i mean this is i’ve always just thought of using it for, you know, a big piece of meat that the cull fat is big enough for. Yeah i feel like my world has changed just this

Alison:
Is me particularly aren’t fatty because you can add fat you know you add that cool fat around the outside which just keeps all the you know the good juice yeah but um i thought this is so good i could use it to make sausages you know i could use it for all these other.

Andrea:
Oh yeah oh yeah

Alison:
Yeah how about you well.

Andrea:
I love that i haven’t had breakfast, but I had an amazing dinner last night. I have a friend staying here. She’s living today actually, but she’s been here for a week. And she was one of my yoga teachers back in Virginia Beach. And she comes out every year for about a week and we just spend time together talking and basically cooking a lot. And she’s vegetarian and eats fish. And so it’s kind of fun for me because it’s an exercise in cooking without, you know, lots of pork broth or big pieces of meat. And I mean, we, we, I was telling her I should be recording this menu for that menu booklet thing because it’s every day we’re just like, wow, this is the best. This is the best meal. This is the best meal. And last night she taught me how to make palak paneer, which is an Indian dish And she travels to India pretty much every year and stays for a while. And she has friends there who teach her to cook. And so she brings these ideas back to me. And so she made this last night. I didn’t end up being in the kitchen the whole time that she was working, but we started by making paneer cheese, which is, as far as I’m understanding, it’s basically you’re making ricotta, and then we squeeze it in the butter muslin. to make it into like

Alison:
Kind of a.

Andrea:
Block of cheese rather than the crumbled pieces of cheese so kind of like a pressed ricotta and then she cut that into cubes later during the cooking and then she made what’s called a gravy so we have green garlic and fresh spring onions she basically sat down on the floor and went through my spice drawer and she pulled out tons you know we have fresh cardamom

Andrea:
And everything, all the spices were freshly ground in the mortar and pestle. Nothing was stale or dry. And she used, I don’t even know, I asked her, how many spices did you use? She was like, I lost count. She used a lot. We had fresh herbs in there and then tons of spinach, tons and tons of spinach. And so all of this is kind of ground together into this, oh man, And it’s so delicious, Allison, into this kind of gravy that she toasted on butter. She said usually she sees people use olive oil, but I don’t have olive oil. So, um… Then she cubes in this paneer and so, so delicious. And then there’s this new, it’s amazing. I mean, when we were eating it, I said, you know, I sprinkled a little salt on and I said, oh man, this just made the colors pop. And then I said, I mean, the spices. And she goes, no, I think you got it right the first time. And I said, yeah, I feel like I see spices like colors when I’m eating them. So then that was that was amazing when you probably i’m a seizure or something

Andrea:
All of her sacks what but anyways that then we also had this would also be traditionally served with i think rice but i don’t have any rice so i had these three little tiny loaves from the gluten-free bakery and she sliced them and toasted them and so then you kind of kind of like scooping it with the bread it was so good oh yeah oh yeah so we feasted we feasted

Alison:
Sounds lovely yeah you know it would have traditionally made it gay depending on what yeah.

Andrea:
That’s that was my guess too i had some gear i had made when she first got here but we churned through it pretty quickly. So we were just using raw butter that I had churned. So, I mean, it was as fresh as could be. But yeah, so anyways, that’s food. Let’s, I know, look at us eating all these fancy feasts right over here. So we’ve got some fun new stuff happening with our supporters community, though. You and I and the listeners have… Talked and discussed and done many things come up with plans some of this news came out in the last episode so let’s talk about

Alison:
It level um for the supporters rather than having four levels we now have five so they’re all different um financial levels you know depending on what your budget is we have a new level called fellowship which um the is kind of in the middle of the financial options and and that level is the level at which if you join us at that level or move to that level then you’re um starting to help put aside some funds so that the two of us can take some money for the work that we do so anyone who joins at that level i’ll be grateful to everyone we’re very grateful to you too yeah that’s not only helping pay for the technical costs of the podcast and the community but also helping to give us some money for all the work that we’re putting in so you can go to ancestral kitchen podcast forward slash join to see all the details and levels.

Andrea:
Um new and exciting

Alison:
It is new and exciting um and also if you haven’t listened to that other episode go back it’s called behind the scenes because there’s some quite interesting stuff in there about behind the scenes i thought.

Andrea:
It was pretty funny

Alison:
Actually i.

Andrea:
Only remember my face hurt after we were done recording i don’t know why everything was cracking me up that day

Alison:
And just before we get into the topic i also wanted to talk about the sweatshirt that so i went to the Leeds Food History Symposium a couple of weeks ago.

Andrea:
I’m not jealous at all. That doesn’t bother me one bit.

Alison:
It’s in York, which is the counter town of Yorkshire in England. And I wore an Ancestral Kitchen podcast sweatshirt which started many conversations, which is wonderful, you know?

Andrea:
I want to hear all about Alison, because so much has been happening. We have I feel like we talk so much more usually. Like sometimes before we start recording, I even know what you ate because I already asked you before we started recording. I didn’t know today. We haven’t even hardly had time to info dump about this thing. I just have some, I’m so excited to hear about it. But yeah, it was really important,

Alison:
Really fun. Lots of very interesting and interested people there. And lots of people looked at my t-shirt and asked questions. So we have, if you go to Ancestral Kitchen podcast, dot com for slash merch there’s a link in the show notes you can see all of the sustainable ethical ancestral kitchen podcast clothing and bags and aprons that are available for you to purchase and show off and tell the world i.

Andrea:
Put some more stuff in there alice and i don’t know if you’ve had a chance to go look no we’ll do that you might be surprised thank you

Alison:
Okay um So we’re talking about home milling in this episode. And the first thing I wanted to do was to say that we’ve had lots of other episodes on kind of sourdough and milling. And there’s one particular one, episode 82, which is called Home Milling Flour for the Best Bread. In that, we talked all about home mills. So if you’re specifically interested in the differences between home mills and which one we recommend and what are the pros and cons of them, go back and listen to episodes 82 because we won’t specifically be covering that in this episode in that 82 we talked about why you’d want to mill your flour why it’s healthier how it’s more economical um how you can use fresh grains when you don’t have a mill the types of mills roller mill versus stone milling your options for your kitchen my mill the mock mill 100, um all you can find in the mock mill and how to use it and, Just how different it is to standard shop-bought pre-ground flour. So do go back and listen to that. But there’s also an after show on that episode.

Andrea:
Yeah, we covered a lot in that episode. Jeez. How did we cram all that in?

Alison:
In the after show available to supporters, we talked about how to adapt all-purpose flour recipes to whole-grain home-milled flour. And we talked about the auto-lease process. We talked about sieving. And we talked literally and practically about the economics of shop-bought flour compared to bulk grain buying um so if you’re really interested in home milling go back and listen to that we’ve also got lots of other episodes that focus on sourdough 103 is called baking with ancient grains 72 all about spelt sourdough 41 rye sourdough bread mastering the basics 51 sourdough q a 110 baking pans with ellie from ellie’s everyday and number seven back in the old days when we’d only done six other podcasts, not 130 something. And that’s called Sourdough, Why We Love It.

Andrea:
Didn’t take us long to get to that subject, did it?

Alison:
Not at all. If you want to listen to any of those episodes, you can go to our website, Ancestral Kitchen Podcast, and there’s a search facility under the episodes menu. And you can pop those titles in and it will come up. Obviously, you can find them on your podcast app as well. We’ve also got our Ancestral Kitchen podcast guide to milling your own flour, which is in the download section of our website. There’s a link in the show notes for that.

Alison:
So that’s kind of our previous milling episodes. This one, we are focusing on questions that have come in from supporters. So thank you ever so much to everyone for all the questions that you sent in. They are all really interesting. And I had to go down a few rabbit holes to make sure I was 100% in what I was offering in the episode, which was really fun for me as well. We have an after show um on this podcast because there were too many questions i looked at the list and i was like we’re never going to fit that in so in the after show we’ll be talking about specifically about how to make a lighter a less crumbly sandwich bread with a 100% freshly milled flour and we will also be talking about wet minning so by that i mean for masa for corn dough and also things like tahini and nut butters um so that’s in the after show so if you are a supporter, you can go to your private podcast feed and you will see that ready for you to listen to. Let’s go to an ad break and then we will dive in.

Alison:
Okay. So using freshly milled flour is not the same as using shop-bought flour. And sometimes that can cause us problems when we switch over. And so I wanted to focus first of all on troubleshooting kind of what’s different. Andrew, do you want to have a look at the first question?

Andrea:
And yeah, so this one, this one comes up pretty much every time somebody starts baking with home-milled flour why aren’t my breads rising as much yeah once they move from like a white flour to a home-milled

Alison:
Flour yeah and and there are two reasons for that and there’s the scientific one which is generally when um when you first milled your flour that the gluten in your flour is not as strong as flour that’s been left to sit so there’s a process called maturing which um, bakers can use for freshening the flour where they basically just leave it and it oxidizes. So basically the grain is open, you’ve milled it and oxygen can access it. That will make the flour stronger. The scientific reason for that is because oxygen exposure promotes the formation of disulfide bridges between gluten proteins, creating a more cohesive and elastic network, apparent. So if you grind your flower fresh, you’re not going to have those disulfide bridges. Commercially, oxidizing agents are added to achieve aging in a few hours. So if you go and look at it. Wow.

Andrea:
They actually, yep,

Alison:
They add things to it.

Andrea:
Actually want it to oxidize.

Alison:
They can’t wait for it to oxidize naturally. They want it to oxidize quickly, quickly. So they add, you might see, if you look at a loaf in a store, a sorbic acid, chlorine dioxide or azocarbonamide. Azocarbonamide. to say that at a certain time.

Andrea:
That just completely boggles my mind because everything we do in life is kind of avoiding oxidizing.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. And this is saying.

Andrea:
And that’s insane, that it’s actually intentionally doing it. Wow. Okay.

Alison:
All right. Only because they want the bread to rise more. You know, it’s a matter of, again, what do you expect from your bread? What do you want from your bread? And well, obviously, we want it to rise more, don’t we? because that’s the bread that we see in the pictures. So that’s what they do. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing to do from our perspective, I don’t think. If you want to take advantage of that, though, and try it, you can mix your bread for longer. That’s what everyone who has kind of addressed this says. Spend more time mixing your bread to allow the formation of the gluten network more fully. Yeah.

Alison:
So that’s one reason why your breads don’t rise as much. In my experience, the main reason why your breads may not rise as much is because probably you’re overproofing them. So there’s a huge, huge difference between working with shop-bought flour, which has been in a bag for you’re not quite sure how long, and you’re bringing it into your kitchen to make bread. And making bread with flour that you’ve literally just ground from a grain and it’s so easy that that home milled flour will be more active have more microbes on it and be super ready to ferment and will ferment much more quickly than a shop bought flour you’ll find later on that um there’s a comment from one of our listeners in canada who calls shot bought flour dead flour and oh that’s why you might call it dead flour because when you freshly mill your grain you realize how active flour is that’s freshly milled and so it’s so easy to overproof it particularly if you’ve been making bread with shot bought flour for a long time you get used to it you get used to how long it takes.

Alison:
And then suddenly you find it takes half the time to proof you know i had this when i swapped and i bought my mock mill 100 and i swapped from um milling with milled flour from a mill to my own um flour i had to pay attention to my breads and actually watch them not going to automatic mode because i was easily over proofing them and then i’d end up with a loaf with a flying crust or with dense or with big holes in it by mistake. So I would say the main reason why your breads don’t rise as much is that you’re overproofing. So experiment with… Cutting back that proofing time watch your actual dough look for the size change and put it in the oven earlier um.

Andrea:
We have i can see your attention in this allison in that in discord when people post pictures of bread you you’re like a bread doctor and you can diagnose i think what you did was and they always say oh you’re right i you know so you’ve and i know this is because you’ve done it all so you’ve seen what happens it’s

Alison:
Hard to tell when you’re not in someone’s kitchen and you haven’t seen what they’ve done but still saying that it is easy to perhaps read between lines and see hang on what’s going on here um and i know like you said because i’ve i’ve done that myself many times in my own kitchen so yeah and we had a similar question which is why do all my breads ferment more quickly why do my my breads pancake and that’s the same thing you know over fermentation a bread will pancake because it’s fermented far more than the gluten network in it can handle and so it goes and kind of pancakes so tells.

Andrea:
You your flour is really good though

Alison:
For sure so again if your breads are pancaking um it’s because they’re fermenting more quickly because the grain is alive and much more active um andrews you want to read what serena said I think this is the one with the dead of the album.

Andrea:
Yeah. Serena says, I’m an avid home miller. I honestly don’t have any questions, but I do wish that Canadian listeners knew that Como makes a mill specifically for Canadians with a larger motor. It’s the Como Mio Eco Plus. I have it and love it. I think something that would have helped me when I first started this journey was understanding how much quicker freshly milled flour ferments, and how there’s a learning curve to using it in recipes that you have been making for years with dead flour. And is this part of the question, or was this a question from Serena, or is this a separate question? No. Why doesn’t… Okay.

Alison:
No, Serena doesn’t have a question. She just wanted to say that. Okay. Okay. But I feel like…

Andrea:
That’s a great tip.

Alison:
It’s the same thing. You know, she’s experienced what I’ve experienced, that fresh-leaf flour foments so much quickly, and therefore you have to relearn how to make the bread. There is another question. Do you want to read that question, Andrea?

Andrea:
Yep. Why doesn’t my grain grind as finely? Yeah so we’re really saying as finely as the commercial okay

Alison:
Yeah as finely as as the flour that i buy from the shop and i think the first response i have to that question is you should see what they do in modern roller mills i.

Andrea:
Mean you would what do they do

Alison:
If you went if you went to a place where there’s a roller mill and then it’s not just a roller mill is it it’s like some piece of machinery and all of his places and i.

Andrea:
Don’t want to go see one

Alison:
Now there are industrial you know and they are specifically designed to get the flour as fine as possible and they sift it and separate it and put things back together they don’t grind the whole grain i’ll just give you the whole grain when you buy whole grain flour they grind the grain and separate it and then And they put the bram back in to the white flour later on if you want to buy whole bram flour.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Alison:
What do they do to the bram?

Andrea:
Do they, like, super pulverize it or something?

Alison:
I don’t know. They just want to have it set up.

Andrea:
Okay. Weigh it. Sorry. Sorry.

Alison:
Do experiments on it.

Andrea:
Oh, jeez. Frankenstein your wheat back together.

Alison:
If you compare that to what we’re doing, what I’m doing in my kitchen with a mock meal, And two stones and electricity, basically, if I’m not using my hand grinder, that’s a completely different process. It’s a stone process that’s done in my kitchen. It is not going to come out necessarily as finely as the flour that you would find in the supermarket, especially not the white flour, which is just the endosperm, which grinds a lot more finely than the brand does.

Alison:
Different mills do offer different fineness. So we have two mills. we have the mock mill 100 which is electric and then we have um an italian marticata marga which is um a hand crank mill and that one if you put the grain through it it’s kind of rustic would be the nice way of saying it you know it’s quite big particles if you want to have a fine flour you’re not going to get it from that and that’s an extreme but different mills do um have different fineness there is a something you can do which is you can try grinding it twice so i’m not really experienced this much with the 100 mock mill because i find it just grinds fine enough for me on number one which is the smallest grind and i use that and i have no problems with it at all but i do know other listeners have put their grains through the mill once and they literally put it through again so getting more fine so that’s that’s the whole thing or yeah the whole like sieve you could sieve it and put the bits that are left through again that would be more work but that’s possible too yeah.

Andrea:
I mean if you had a specific goal you know I want to make an angel food cake or something I could you know it would be worth it

Alison:
Yeah to.

Andrea:
Do something like

Alison:
That probably, Okay.

Andrea:
All right. You ready for the next one?

Alison:
I am.

Andrea:
Okay. All right. This is from Molly. Oh, yay. This is in response to your question. Asking for questions. Oh, yay. I got on here to ask about why everything I make with fresh milled flour is so dry. I know that fresh milled flour absorbs more water. Is there a general recommendation for how much more? Do I just have to go by feel? And if so, how do I know what it’s supposed to feel like? This is a really, this is good. I like this.

Alison:
Yeah. I like this. Yes, it does absorb more flour. Freshly milled flour, sorry, absorbs more water. It’s really difficult for me to give a recommendation for how much more you would want to add to your bread dough. Because, you know, my rye is going to be different from your rye. My spelt’s going to be different from your spelt. My spelt next season is going to be different from my spelt this season. and every soil is different, every grain is different.

Alison:
When you translate that to another variable, freshly milled, it’s so difficult to say, oh, you have to add 25% more water. Ideally, as Molly’s kind of saying, we go by fear and we become injured bakers. That’s hard at the beginning of the journey, though. You know, if you’re at the beginning of your journey and if you’ve messed up a loaf, you just think, oh, it’s just someone tell me, you know, what to do. So if you are at the beginning of the journey I’d say start with 10% more or 15% more and then note what happens and then try again the next time perhaps with 18% more or if it was too much you know 12% more you just have to repeat repeat repeat and remember i take notes because you won’t remember if you don’t remember what happens if you end up putting too much more in then you can always put your bread in a pan to stop it being completely over hydrated and just going into a kind of a flatbread in the oven so that i think if.

Andrea:
Somebody has a super dense loaf you and i know how expensive those loaves are we’re not

Alison:
Throwing them out i.

Andrea:
Sent out in our podcast newsletter maybe a month or two ago, your recipe from your blog for bread lasagna I forget exactly what you called it that would be a really good use for a super dense loaf that you wanted to make use of also when you said take note I Allison I just cannot wait for you to go on and see the t-mill thing so I’m going to tell you one thing that I put in there my friend helped me put together a cover for a kitchen notebook with our conversion tables on the front so you can take the notebook in the kitchen the conversion tables are right there and you can

Alison:
Um you can take notes in that yeah.

Andrea:
You can take notes on your bread i’m just itching for you to go see it yeah okay sorry

Alison:
I should try to remember to put the recipe for bread lasagna in the show notes as well just made it like yeah you should you should next question do you want to read me the next one.

Andrea:
Yep this is this is a classic one

Alison:
How can.

Andrea:
I store my grain this is pretty milled obviously

Alison:
Um this is yeah before before it’s been milled how can i store my whole grain when it comes to me in bags of how many kilos you need to put it somewhere that’s the very very important you don’t need to freeze it but you can if you want to if you do decide you want to freeze it you should wrap it well in the freezer to stop it absorbing any flavors or smells from the freezer, um the reason you might want to freeze it is because of weevils so generally you wouldn’t you wouldn’t need to freeze it because grain can last, hundreds thousands of years without any problems at all you know archaeologists.

Alison:
Brain antiquity and still found it’s it’s fine so you don’t need to freeze it but if you live in a particularly kind of hot or humid environment weevils can be a problem in grains and we have talked about this in previous episodes there are eggs in the bag of grains when it’s delivered to you and in humid conditions those eggs can hatch so the way to avoid that is by freezing your brain fun just for a short amount of time to kill the eggs before you put it in your cupboard if you don’t have a big freezer which i don’t you can do it in batches so you then kind of cycle your grain so you’ve got a bag of 20 kilos you could take five kilos at a time freeze them for a week a couple of days take them out and then move the next batch of five kilos in um so you don’t need to have a massive freezer to freeze your grains um and i always freeze mine for a week um i was was oh yeah just if you think you potentially might have had weevils or if you’ve had weevils before you’re probably going to think i want to do that because it is quite sad to open a bag of flour that’s you know 30 pounds 15 kilos and find weevils in it um because you end up just having to throw it away and that feels really sad so you know to be on the side of caution then you could freeze it. But you don’t need to. You could just put it in the cupboard. It’s absolutely fine. Okay. And we had weevils once in Italy. We haven’t had them since then.

Alison:
So, you know, that’s it. Right.

Andrea:
Okay. Next question is another really good one. My flour gets hot when milling. What about this? Good, bad.

Alison:
Yeah. So we don’t really want our flour to get hot over a certain temperature anyway, because the hotter a flour gets.

Alison:
The more likely it is that the enzymes in the flour are going to be killed and things are going to be denatured. So the main thing for flour warming which it will warm if you are milling the flour that comes out of my mock mill 100 it does warm up you know it’s not the same temperature as the grains that that go in it at the beginning so you need to pay attention to the manufacturer recommendations for how long you can run that machine for they’ve done tests on it they’ve had all the thermometers out you know they’ve tested it they know so look that up before you start with your meal how long can I run this for and then after I run it for that long how long do I need to leave it for for it to cool down okay and that cool down you know that’s resting your machine so don’t like slam your machine with you know grinding like five kilos of flour in a row give it time to rest the other thing you can do if you have frozen your berries is take your berries straight from the freezer so another reason why you might want to freeze your berries is because you know that your berries get hot when they go through the mill and you don’t want that to be the case maybe your your loaf over proofs if you end up with flour too hot because you’re in a hot environment so you can keep your berries in the freezer and freeze them straight and mill them straight from the freezer and then they’re starting they’re starting the whole process at a lower temperature and so they’re going to end the process at a lower temperature as well.

Andrea:
I never thought about doing that. Yeah. That’s a great idea.

Alison:
Okay. I’ve got some other topics to move on to. So let’s take an ad break now and we will come back in a moment. Okay, so in this section, we’re going to talk about sieving, storing, a bit more about storing, and the settings on your home meal. We’ve got some questions about oat and about corn, and we’ve got some questions about gluten-free grains. Okay. Do you want to start with the question from Rachel? Rachel.

Andrea:
I do. Best way to store extra flour if you mill more than you need at the moment? What are the ideal and acceptable timeframes to use freshly milled flour within?

Alison:
Yeah, that’s a good question because I feel like not all of us necessarily have the time in the kitchen to weigh out the grains beforehand and just grind that much. Or maybe we just want to refresh our starter and we don’t know how much we’re going to need and so we just throw some grains in and then we end up with some leftover um and and that’s kind of normal in a in a kitchen that’s busy and kind of moving all the time where we don’t necessarily can’t be completely accurate with scales because we’re doing five other things perhaps and we just need to know some flour so it’s a great question exactly you know that very well so ideally of course we wouldn’t store it at all because that’s the point of grinding it freshly and when it’s ground freshly the enzymes in it haven’t been exposed to oxygen and so they haven’t degraded as soon as that flour is out of your mill and left then the goodies in it start to disappear that’s the whole point um nutrient loss in flour is mainly due to that oxygen exposure, oxidation, and that’s happening from the moment we’ve ground it.

Alison:
You can slow down oxidation by putting your flour in the fridge, or you can slow it down even further by putting your flour in the freezer. So.

Alison:
For me, if I have flour left over, sometimes I just measure the flour in the grains and I mill exactly what I want. But sometimes I am refreshing my starter or I’m making a pancake and I’m not really sure how much I’m going to need. And I just mill, you know, half a cup or a cup and I do have some left over. I put that in the fridge and I store those flowers in the fridge. So I have, you know, the container with the flower in and then a little label on it, which tells me what type of flower it is, because otherwise it’s just going to be in the fridge and I’m going to forget whether it’s spelt or rye or millet, you know, so I always label it. If you want to store it longer than a couple of days, you could put it in the freezer. It’s kind of like, you know, with fermentation. If you leave it on the counter, it’s going to go quickly. If you put it in the fridge, it’s going to slow down. If you put your water kefir grains in the freezer, they’re really going to slow down. You know, it’s the same progression.

Alison:
Remember that because we’re dealing with whole grain flour, because we’ve milled it ourself, the delicate oils that are in the germ have also been exposed to the air. So whole grain flour will not last as long as white flour after it’s been ground. So if you’ve got your whole grain flour and you sieve it and you’ve just got white flour, that’s going to last longer because you’ve sieved out the germ which has the oil in and therefore that’s not going to go rancid because exposing that germ to oxygen will make it go rancid. So the way that my kitchen generally works is that I usually do have a stash of pre-ground rye flour in the fridge for making my starter and for lining tins. Other than that, I try not to have extra flour. I do sometimes because that’s what happens. But I purposefully make rye flour and leave some in the fridge because I always want some to line a tin with. And, you know, sometimes I think, oh, the starter needs refreshing and I can just grab that flour out of the fridge and that’s really useful to have. I think regarding the timings, Rachel’s question on timings, it’s hard to say, you know, ideal is you use it immediately.

Alison:
Acceptable for me in the fridge would be a week to 10 days, I think. And in the freezer, a couple of weeks.

Alison:
It’s usually for me, not a lot I have left over. So you know i’m not going to have a pound a pound and a half of flour left over 600 grams of flour left over that’s what i use in a loaf i’m going to have more like 50 grams of flour left over a couple of ounces so in reality you know if i end up adding that to a new loaf which has got you know 600 grams in it that’s 50 grams of old flour i’m not that bothered about it really that it’s been in the fridge for you know a week 10 days so i say go with the flow but yeah that would be my, that would be ideal immediately maybe a week to 10 days in the fridge and a couple of weeks in the freezer. Does that make sense, Andrea?

Andrea:
That makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of keeping a little bit on hand for just feeding a starter maybe quickly. That’s perfect. And for me, since I don’t really want to have to turn the power on just to feed a starter, I don’t usually keep flour in the freezer but I’m kind of thinking, oh, I might do that. Just to be able to feed it more conveniently, so.

Alison:
Okay, the next two questions are kind of the same. So do you want to read them both?

Andrea:
Okay, yeah, you let me know if there’s any nuance you want to add in or if they’ve already been answered. Okay, Rachel asked, what are the differences in types of mills, stone mill versus impact? How much does the higher heat produced by an impact mill affect the nutrients in the grain? All right, she’s getting into the details here.

Alison:
And do we read Paige’s question as well?

Andrea:
Yes, I have the same question, says Paige. I get mixed thoughts on stone mills versus impact mills on the nutrition quality of the flour, and I’m torn personally between buying a wonder mill or a mock mill. So the wonder mill is an impact mill, and the mock mill is the stone mill that you have. So that is why she’s contrasting those two.

Alison:
Yeah, right. So we talked about this a little bit in that episode that I mentioned at the front, this episode, which I think was 82. But I do want to speak to it a bit here because I did a bit more research on it. So obviously heat does have an impact on nutrient loss. The higher the heat, the more nutrients we are potentially going to lose.

Alison:
I think in my opinion, using the flour quickly is more important because oxidization produces nutrient loss very definitely.

Alison:
The newer impact mills that you can buy now have better airflow designed into them. And so they can keep flour at a similar temperature to a stoner. That’s what I looked. You know, I’ve looked recently and kind of researched the difference between them. So both types of mills seem to keep the flour under the 135F, which is 57C. That Pleasant Hill Grain, a very big company, say that nutrient degradation starts. So for both an impact meal and a stone meal if you follow that figure you’re not going to be losing any nutrients by just milling obviously you’re going to be if you leave the flour but not by just milling um right i know though that enzyme degradation starts at 41c which is 105f um you know because of my raw food days you would never heat anything above 41c if you were raw food in because that’s when you start to lose enzymes. So I think there is going to be some damage by the heat that the meal is producing. And if you’re concerned about that, then you can do what we said earlier and freeze your grains. But I don’t think there’s a massive difference between an impact meal, a modern impact meal and a stone meal on that one.

Alison:
Okay but yeah go back and have a listen to episode 82 as well because there’s a lot more in there on the difference between those two if you’re kind of questioning should i should i get the wonder mill should i get an impact mill should i get a lot and i’ll go back and listen to that episode yeah okay.

Andrea:
There’s a question from me. I posted, I responded to your call for questions. And I said, I want to learn more about fresh milling gluten-free grains and the benefits of that.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Okay. So.

Alison:
So we’re going to be talking in the next section of the podcast specifically about oatmeal and corn, which are both obviously gluten-free grains.

Andrea:
I didn’t even know you could put oat through.

Alison:
I

Andrea:
Mean it never crossed my mind so okay

Alison:
You don’t want to know how many times I’ve done that and how many times I’ve seen I.

Andrea:
Do want to know actually

Alison:
But so we’ll be talking about those a bit later so I won’t specifically focus on those but basically is there a grain that you can’t mill I just don’t think there is I mean I regularly mill in my mock mill buckwheat oats corn brown rice white rice and i’ve also in the past ground teff and quinoa i don’t do those regularly okay um but i just i don’t think there’s any grain that you couldn’t put through a meal and you know as long as it’s dry you’ll be able to grind it really finely and you’ll be getting freshly milled grains for your gluten-free pancakes or gluten-free bread it’s just it’s just wonderful okay you need to start, I think. You just start doing it.

Andrea:
The taste difference with gluten-free products. So I have some, well I had, I think it’s all gone now, but I had some pre-milled gluten-free flours and I kind of just used them up in whatever. But… I’ve been grinding it in the Vitamix because my mill’s pretty much just full of wheat, as you know. And so, gosh, the taste is amazing. The flavor difference. I mean, everything just…

Alison:
I mean, we talked about that in episode 82. Just the difference in flavor between shop-bought flour and fresh new mill flour. It’s just… It’s incongruable.

Andrea:
Yeah, it’s, you get to taste the benefits of those grains or, you know, the things that they bring to the table, quite literally, as opposed to just, oh, here’s some faceless, nameless kind of bland grain that doesn’t taste like anything. On the on the note of the mock mill allison i want to i want to make sure to note if somebody is listening to this i’m thinking about getting a mock mill go to ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash milling because not only do you have really good information as well as pictures there on the different sizes and models and what people might be looking for and using it for but you if you want to shop for a mock mill go through that link because the podcast gets immediate turnaround benefit from mock milk. It does not cost the listener any more. It doesn’t change the price of your machine that you’re buying. But they just give us credit for having pointed customers their way. If you don’t go through our link and then buy your mockable from there, there’s no way to tell them and we don’t really get any benefits. So somebody just bought one the other day and she told me that she used our link. So I was like, oh, I should ask Allison if that popped up. So that was really awesome. So yeah, AncestralKitchenPodcast.com forward slash milling. And you put a lot of, it’s a full article. The links are there, but it’s also a full article with a little more detail than what you’re going into here on something. I think there might be a cute picture of

Alison:
Gabriel in there. It’s not y’all.

Andrea:
I know. Every time I see pictures of Gabriel or the kids, you know, that we used early on in the podcast, I’m like, wow, we’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, I think. Yeah. Okay. I have another question about sieving. And can you sieve these flours? Maybe talk a little bit about that. You’ve kind of briefly alluded to it already once.

Alison:
Yeah, you can sieve. Obviously, it’s just going to take you more time, you know, because the beauty of having a stone mill on the counter is that you measure out your grains, you put it through the mill, and bing, you’ve got flour, you make bread. It takes minutes. if you want to sieve yeah by all means sieve but that’s going to take you more time it’s going to use more equipment and a tensile and more clearing off but you can okay my recommendation with that is to use a bowl that’s substantially bigger than your sieve because if you just use it yeah it just goes everywhere and it goes all over i have.

Andrea:
Tried that it is torture

Alison:
So make sure your sieve fits neatly right inside that bowl to avoid dustiness and mess everywhere um i have i i invested last year in a sieve set so rather than having you know kind of two or three sieves around that all have their own handles and all everything i’ve got a big kind of um metal i suppose it looks like the sides of a high cake tin you know one of those loose bottom cake tins where you just circles like a wheel, And then there are six different sieves that fit inside. So you just pop. Wow. Put it down, push it down and it clicks into place. You mean different finenesses? Yes, different grades. I think that’s a technical term.

Andrea:
Grades. Grades. Different grades. That sounds better.

Alison:
So unfortunately, when I bought it, it didn’t say what the different grades were. So I had to get an alkaline glass out because that’s what I like. I had to do it with oats to really figure out how to produce fine oatmeal. Medium opening on course openers or i had to know the size of the sieve so i could tell someone how to do it so we had to get my glass out and the ruler and everything but um i love that these six sieves and it’s so useful because i just pop one out for the next one in pop one out for the next one in so you know you can see oh.

Andrea:
Do you mean in terms do you do you mean in terms of oh i sieve it and then i put the next grade in or you just

Alison:
Oh exactly so you can sieve it for a for a grade that’s um bigger how.

Andrea:
Fine does it get

Alison:
I can get very fine i have to know they’re like the i think it’s like half a millimeter this is one i’ve got gosh i.

Andrea:
Don’t even know what that looks like but

Alison:
The next one you can zip it through the next one and then you get such fine flour um and then you can do what you said earlier which is you can sieve some of it and then the thing that’s left in the sieve you can put it through the mill again so you’ll get that far okay if you want to, um so having a sieve set is particularly useful we’ll talk about it when we talk about oats a bit later a bit later on um so yeah that’s sieving it’s simple it takes time and it’s useful to have a sieve set for that.

Andrea:
Okay, follow up on that question is from Shannon. Yeah, can I read this one? She said, okay, I also want to know more about the recipe slash nutritional effects of sifting some of the bran out. Yeah, what are we doing when we do that?

Alison:
Yeah, okay.

Andrea:
That’s a good one.

Alison:
There’s something that Lizzie put in the forum, the Discord forum, that I want you to read, Andrea, because it’s really useful. Oh, God. He’s done some work on this. Do you want to do that?

Andrea:
Okay, Lizzie, supporters have heard her on the after show. She did a full episode for us with you on literally professionally tasting food and learning how to describe food. And if you’re a supporter, go into the Discord. You can follow her channel in there where she is doing this entire grain-wheel flavor project. I think I got it wrong. Project. And she posts articles in there every so periodically as she tastes different grains and hybrids and things. So here’s what she said. I have sifted the bran out of some of my recipes. I made a cake for my grandson. And the last time I made it with the bran, the cake had a coarseness to it that did not fit the style of the cake. I put the bran in a jar in my freezer. So the bran that she sifted out of the next time she made the cake. And I will roll a loaf of bread in it before putting it in the bread tenter eyes. What? I also want to duplicate a roll recipe, and the bran can cut the strands of gluten and keep a dough from developing larger holes. So for that recipe, the rolls, I sifted again. It’s not very often, but wow, I am always surprised to see how much bran is actually in the flour.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, you know, Allison, do you have that thing over there, like bran muffins where you make these recipes that are supposed to be healthy fibers or something like that?

Alison:
They are.

Andrea:
I just know the name, right? So I guess if you, my mom always used whole wheat, so I guess they were bran muffins anyways, right? Yeah, I put the bran in them.

Alison:
Not as constant as bran. You can buy bran in the health food store.

Andrea:
Oh, so if you’re making a bran muffin, are you saying you’d be putting in more bran than would come in the… Oh, yes. Yes. Okay, which I guess if you’re making, if you made a batch of cake, if you made a batch of rolls, then you would be accumulating bran, so you could do that. Yeah, you could if you could. Theoretically.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Okay. All right, talk to us about this.

Alison:
So, yeah, I wanted to read that quote from Lizzie because I thought it was really useful because she’s actually doing it in the kitchen. And Shannon asked the kind of nutritional effects of sifting out the bran. Right. I think, well, most of the nutrients in bread flour are in the bran and the germ. And so if you grind them up and then sift them out, you are taking those nutrients out of your flour and potentially your bread. That’s why, you know, we often hear people saying, oh, white flour, it’s just empty calories. Because it’s just the white, the endosperm of the grain, which really doesn’t have any nutrients in it. It just has energy in it because it’s the energy that’s required for the germ inside to germinate. It feeds it for the germ. Oh. So it’s energy. So you’re looking out on the nutrients in bread.

Andrea:
So the germ is like that for out there. I’m thinking of it like an egg, like the yolk and the white.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
Kind of like the nutrients side of it.

Alison:
The yolk in the egg is that sort of spot that sometimes you see in it. And then the endosperm is the yellow bit because that’s the bit that feeds the germ inside, if we’re going to do that analogy. Anyway, the white’s probably the chaff on the grain when it’s in the field, maybe. Um anyway um if you want to have your flour more fine and that’s why you’re taking the bran out you can do what we were talking about a bit earlier which is where you sip the bran out and then put that bran again through your meal and if you do that that bran will break down somewhat more and any germ that you’ve sifted out will break down somewhat more and then if you sift it again you will get finer versions of that bran and germ in with your white flour again that takes time which is why i don’t do it um.

Alison:
As well as missing out on the nutrients, if you get rid of that bran, you’re missing out on the fiber because the bran is the fiber, which is why there are bran muffins, because the idea of a bran muffin is to give you extra fiber to keep you regular. So you’re missing out on that fiber. On the flip side of it, potentially, you are removing the problems of phytic acid because phytic acid is in the bran of a grain. So if you remove the bran from the grain, then you are removing the phytic acid so potentially you are solving that problem but really you’re not solving that problem because you’re not getting the nutrients because you’re not having the grain so, rather than the phytic acid killing the nutrients when it gets into your stomach or stopping you absorbing them you’re not even getting the nutrients in the first place so I think that cancels itself out is that what I’m saying um as you said um there’s a lot of bangers Lizzie said as well um there will be a lot of bran if you sift it out so do use it i think lizzie’s idea of coating a loaf in it is absolutely brilliant um you know you can make brown muffins you can um take that bran and soak it to make it softer and put it back in the bread um because a lot of the reason that we freshly meal flour is because we want to save money and so if you’re sifting that brand out regularly then you’re costing yourself a lot more so try to use that brand.

Alison:
Um, okay. The last question in this section is from Paige, who asked a kind of a similar, um, question, which is, I’d love to know if you get any benefits from the freshly milled flour, if you mix it with pre-ground flour or if that kind of ruins it.

Alison:
Um, and I go back to what I said earlier, which is, you know, if I’ve kept flour in the fridge for like a week or 10 days, it’s usually only a small amount that I mix with my freshly ground flour and I’m not bothered that I’ve lost some of the nutrients. It’s kind of the same with pre-ground flour you know sometimes for some reasons i will buy some pre-ground flour so for example i’ve been making cakes for some of gable’s friends for his for their birthdays and two of the boys who go to all the parties are celiac and so i can’t put the flour for those cakes through my meal because my meal has been used and is used regularly to grind gluten containing grains so sometimes in this example i buy pre-ground flour and i think if i had some of that left i wouldn’t be bothered about putting a little bit in with my fresh ground flour um but that pre-ground flour that i bought from a shop will have all the downsides that we’ve talked about of pre-ground flour you know it will have lost its nutrients it will have been shelf up for ages and so you know if you want to mix them together you can um and if you mix it the fresh female flour is going to have some really good benefits in it but if you end up doing it all the time and putting large amounts of pre-ground flour and you’re going to be losing quite a lot of benefits i think does that make sense andrea and do you have any other questions it does no that’s good no okay no.

Andrea:
I like it

Alison:
Okay, that’s great. So let’s go to an ad break and be back to talk some more stuff in a moment. Okay, so we’re going to talk on other things we can do in the motwil and some interesting things. Andrea, do you want to read Rachel’s first question here?

Andrea:
Yeah, this is a fun one. Rachel says, what are other uses I’m missing out on besides grains? The wildest I’ve gotten is grinding popcorn kernels to make cornbread, but I’m sure there’s lots more. First of all, I didn’t know you could grind popcorn kernels. Is this something she does or does she mean dried corn, which is different than popcorn kernels?

Alison:
I think she means corn that is dried and could therefore be made into popcorn if you wanted it to. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah not not already not you know yeah i’m.

Andrea:
Sure some corn person out there could maybe show us a diagram of all the

Alison:
Terms yeah yeah yeah so i think um we we tend to forget that you can use meals for lots of other things other than just grinding grain for bread and it’s taken me a while to get used to using the mock meal for other things but slowly slowly i’m getting there so you can grind spices and herbs in your mock meal and when i went to see nicole in italy she was doing that kind of routine now i was like oh i’ve forgotten you could do that spices so okay yeah you can literally put put whole cinnamon sticks in the mock meal which is quite amazing cinnamon.

Andrea:
Uh i did not know that and it doesn’t just kind of get lost

Alison:
In in.

Andrea:
Between the stones it

Alison:
No no you can you can grind it i mean you look you look at the mock meal um grinding chart i will put links to one of them in the show notes and that will tell you know what number you can grind them at because some of them you can’t grind right down on the finest setting and that’s probably true of every other meal um i think you’ve got to put a reasonable amount in there because otherwise you know there’s always a little bit that gets left in the in the machinery and so if you’re only going to put you know a couple of teaspoons in that’s really not going to provide anything so if you’re doing them on their own then you’d want to put a fair bit in there for it to come through but you can also do it within your flour so if you want to put some if you’re making like pumpernickel and you want to put some anise or you want to put some caraway within your rye bread then you can just literally put your rye grains in there and put the caraway in at the same time and then the caraway will be ground.

Andrea:
I did not see this coming. This was not on my mock bell bingo card. And do you have to run something afterwards to kind of

Alison:
I think if the spice is particularly pungent, you can run through some harder grain like rice or millet to clean it out at the end. It depends how fussy you are about whether that flavor might go into the next thing that you grind through. Generally, we wouldn’t be bothered. You know, if there’s a tiny bit of caraway that comes out and some pancakes after I’ve made rye bread, we’re not going to be bothered by that.

Alison:
The other thing you can do is seeds. Now you have to be careful with seeds because obviously they are oily and the oilier something is, the more likely it is to gum up the meal. So what I generally do with seeds is just mix them in with my bread. So when I make gluten-free bread, I quite often put linseed, which is flaxseed, in with it. And although we’ve usually got linseed in the fridge pre-ground because I grind it every three or four days and then keep a stash in the fridge, sometimes we haven’t. And in that case, I would just put the whole linseeds in with my flour, mix it up. So they’re not all like going to be resting on the top and go through them in at the same time. I’ll mix them in and then I’ll put them through. You have to be careful what percentage you put through because I’ve done it too much in the past. I’ve put too much linseed in. Maybe if I’m making gluten-free, sometimes I’m using, you know, four different grains. And so the amount of those grains is lower. You know, I’ve only got 100 grams, like four ounces of one of them, you know, rather than 600 grams, you know, over a pound. And so you just have to be careful not to put too much in because I’ve done it where I’ve just been, you know, only grinding a little bit of buckwheat. And then I’ve put some linseed in and I’ve been like, oh, let me all stop. But it’s not, now I’m used to undoing the mock meal and cleaning it out. It’s not really been a problem. You know, I either run some other grains through it or I just take the lid off and use a little brush and brush it through. And then I put the lid back on.

Alison:
So it’s not. My mind is completely just a shock.

Andrea:
Like I, my mind is whirling now.

Alison:
If you do it, if you do it wrong, it is salvageable. It’s not something that you’re going to be, oh my gosh, I’ve got to send it back. You know you just you you’ll actually get used to taking the mill apart and much more familiar with it so um that’s a good thing the one tip i would say is if you do take your mill apart if you’ve got a mock mill there are two tiny little springs that hold the top um stone away from the bottom stone and they are really difficult to um they’re really easy rather to lose and so in the past i’ve tipped my mop mill upside first time I ever did it I tipped the mop mill upside down to get the residual stuff that was stuck in there out um we didn’t realize this was a mock mill cleaning podcast and the spring went and I don’t know where it went because I wasn’t paying attention oh and luckily I contacted mop mill and they said oh we just send you some new strings so they sent me another.

Andrea:
Set I think I remember that

Alison:
I think I told you about it yeah um so just be careful of the little springs if you do need to clean it out because you do put too much seeds but you can do seeds you can crack pulses so if you’ve got you know chickpeas or some other pulse that you want to cook and you want them smaller you can crack them in the mock meal you can grind shea seeds in the mock meal you can also grind pulses into a flour so the mock meal can grind peas it can grind kidney beans it can grind lentils into a flour on the lowest setting i’ve never done it, but it says you can do it. So I think, you know, you could make a, make a dial with it. You can make interesting porridges with a meal. So you can, for example, put in a mix of grains, not just oats. You could put oats, rye, buckwheat, emma, and grind them so that they have some bite to them before cooking. You don’t have to have it on the finest setting. Porridge could be made like a steel-cut kind of size of porridge. And you can just make up your own porridges by pouring whatever grains you want, Putting the settings to higher, grinding them, and then you’ve got kind of a custom porridge mix, which is fun.

Andrea:
I don’t want to do this so badly.

Alison:
Psyllium seeds. Psyllium seeds is another one.

Andrea:
Okay.

Alison:
I’ve read Naomi Devlin, the gluten-free sourdough baker who wrote the River Cottage book and has written another book since then, talking about how the thickness of your psyllium is quite important in gluten-free bread making. And if yours is too thick, therefore, you can put it through the mock meal to make it thinner, or you can buy the seeds. So it’s not being previously ground. You mean coarse?

Andrea:
Yes. Like too coarse?

Alison:
Yeah. Aaron both talked about that. they.

Andrea:
Say you know you you might feel like a recipe didn’t come out and the texture was off and it’s often they seem to be implying that like there’s a lot of

Alison:
Brands where the.

Andrea:
Coarse coarse grind it’s not necessarily bad but it’s for a different purpose

Alison:
Yeah absolutely so and and so that if you put it through the mock meal you’ll be able to make it finer or by the seeds which haven’t been ground so obviously they’re going to keep longer and grind it yourself yeah gosh um sprouted grains can go through the mock meal as well. You do have to remember if you’re sprouting them yourself at home, that they must be completely dehydrated because any meal is not going to do well unless it’s designed to work with wet grains, which we’ll talk about a bit later. It won’t work well with anything wet. It needs to be completely dry. So if you do sprout your own grains, make sure you dehydrate them before you put them through the meal completely. So you can make your own malt you can make malt to um put in beer or you can make malt to add to breads which adds a really sweet deep flavor to it um could you that’s lots of ideas dry.

Andrea:
Out your beer grains and grind them is that what you mean

Alison:
Yeah you could you could okay yeah when i was doing that mostly i didn’t have a mock meal so i wasn’t grinding them i was drying them out and then putting them on my bread kind of whole because we didn’t have them put in through my crank crank grinder but I don’t see why you could put it through the mock mail. Okay, Rachel’s got another question, Andrew. Do you want to read that one too?

Andrea:
How and why to choose the setting, coarse versus fine. I’m particularly interested in this because the mill that I currently have, which is an old one that my mom had since I was a child, doesn’t, I mean, it has a slight variation, but it’s not like the mock mill where you can choose different settings. So my mom and I are both planning to get mock mills. And And this is going to be something that we’ll have a lot of fun toying around with. But I don’t know anything about this part.

Alison:
Yeah. Okay. So the mock mill is similar to the other mills like the Como. And when you look at a mock mill from the side, you’ve got a lever and it says one to 10. And the one is the finest and the 10 is the widest that you can see. What’s interesting is that you can push that lever through to 10, which seems like it’s the widest, but then you can loosen the lever. So it’s not actually active, pull the lever back to number one, tighten it up again, and then push it to number 10 again, which in effect is number 20. And you can do it again to number 30. So I do that quite regularly and often forget to put it back to number one, which will annoy Rob. And he’s like, what’s going on? My brain’s coming out all chunky. Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot to put it. And he doesn’t know how to put it back.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
He doesn’t, he doesn’t want to know how to put it back so when that happens he just goes oh can’t do anything you need to come and sort it out alison um you know what scared i think he bails.

Andrea:
Us out enough that he gets this

Alison:
One yeah exactly he i’ll let him have that one um so really what i was talking about earlier with the different ways you can use the mockmill is where that coarse versus fine comes in in a grinder um and i just say experiment with it don’t be scared to push it to 10 to push it to 20 to push it to 30 put things through and see how they come out put pulses through see if they come up put oats through see how they come out i often grind my oats more thickly if i want to create that different texture for my porridge that we were talking about and you could do that for any type of grain or pulse um the mockman as i said does have a guide which explains what’s the finest level you can grind any of the different products at and i’ll put a link to that in the show notes, And we had a question about corn, which is just, can I mill corn? Yeah. And it was interesting because when I was at Nicole’s, I said, oh, I’ve never ground corn in my mill. And she looked it up for me. And on the Mock Mill 100, which I have, you need to mill it at number 15 first, which is basically what I said. You know, you put it around to 10, you disengage it, bring it back to one and then put it around to five. So you’ve got 15. And then that goes through to break up that corn to start with. So just like what Rachel was saying, she’s ground popcorn kernels. You would grind them like that first, which makes them a little bit smaller because corn’s really hard. And then once they’re broken up a little bit, you put the setting back to a fine setting. You can put it right down to one and put the corn through. And it just makes it a bit easier in the mill.

Andrea:
That’s a good idea. I would like to be able to mill the corn for our corn tortillas. Is that, do you think I could get it down fine enough?

Alison:
Yeah I don’t know about your meal but you would be able to on a mick meal on a mock meal yeah no I can.

Andrea:
Definitely tell you I could not right

Alison:
Now I.

Andrea:
Could for sure say that Okay, and then before we move away from these kind of oddball ones, I wanted to ask about oats because I know I’ve heard things floating around in the ether about oats gumming up mills and stuff. So, could you put oats through the mock mill?

Alison:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So, yes, you can. And as you probably aren’t surprised to hear, I’ve done lots of experiments with trying to put oats through the mock mill. So the reason why they can gum up the mill, any mill, is because they are higher in fat than most grains. And that fat obviously is more liquidy than the dry part of the grain and then can gum it up.

Alison:
When you look at the paperwork for the Mock Mill 100, it says not to mill oats finer than number three. In my experiments, I kind of don’t like doing them on the first grind, any finer than five, which I’ll explain in a little bit. So if first of all, say you want steel cut oats, which are those thicker oats to make your porridge, you can mill your oats on what would be number 20 on the mock mill. That’d be a wide setting on one of the other mills. When you do that on any stone mill and you grind at a at a a coarser level you still end up getting some fine bits of grain so it won’t look exactly like steel cut oats that you would buy from a store because you’ll have some bits that are big like steel cut oats but you will also have some bits that are much much much smaller and if you cook that mix without um putting it through a sieve If you just put it straight in your pan and make porridge with it, it works really well, but it doesn’t replicate the texture of commercial steel cut oats because the smaller bits in it, which aren’t in steel cut oats, they sieve them out.

Alison:
Soak up more water and then you end up with a porridge that has a consistency that’s more gluey than one that’s just made with larger particles of oats so you can go ahead and do that or if you want to try to replicate steel cut oats a bit more then you need to use a sieve to sieve out those small bits which will be more like fine oat flour which you could use for something else pancakes and then use what’s left in your sieve to make porridge.

Alison:
And with that same idea in mind, with the sieve, you can make fine oatmeal. And that’s, when I say fine oatmeal, I mean it’s like a bread flour, slightly coarser than a bread flour, but not much more coarse. And that’s the oatmeal that I use at home for oat cakes and a lot of my other recipes. So the way I do that is I first mill the oats at number five on the mock meal. So that would be kind of not fine, but not coarse if you’re using another sort of meal. Then I put that through a sieve and about 70% of it goes through the bigger bits that are left in the sieve that haven’t gone through it I put back in the mock mill and I make the lever finer because at that point you can put it through more finely so I generally put the lever on three, and then I catch what comes out and I put that through the sieve and then usually I do it a third time and there’s you know at the end of that process there’s usually only like I think I worked out 2% that’s left over that hasn’t been ground really, really finely. There is a very detailed article on my website that explains the grade of sieves that I use and how I do it. And it’s got pictures. So I will put that in the show notes. So people, if they want to try that, can follow my instructions on it.

Andrea:
Yes, please.

Alison:
I will. Okay. So we’re going to have an after show now. Do you want to just let listeners know what, because there are two really good questions we’re going to answer in the after show. So just explain what they are.

Andrea:
Okay, so we’ve got, these are good questions. One is, I want to know more about making a lighter and less crumbly sandwich bread with 100% fresh milled flour, like we did in the 90s with the questionable dough enhancer. Anybody else remember that with the Bosch mixer? Yes, I was there. That was a homeschool subculture. You had the Bosch mixer, you had the grinder, and you had the tub of dough enhancer. Although I don’t know why it never really caught on in our household. But everywhere else I went, I saw that dough enhancer. And I don’t even know what it does. So because it made it softer. I don’t know. And then the other question is, I would love to learn more about how people are wet milling like masa or soy milk and mixing oily things like tahini. Yeah, I want to know that too. So that’ll be a great after show. After this main show, which people can find the after show. It’s an entire extra podcast for all of our supporters who keep this on the air. We’ve just got an extra show for them, and it has more episodes than this feed does, I’m pretty sure. So you can find that if you are a supporter, that all of that information would have come to your email.

Alison:
Brilliant. Okay, so just before we head off, I want to remind people that we’ve got our home milling guide on our website. The link is in the show notes or it’s just ancestralkitchenpodcast.com forward slash milling. Thank you very much for being my foil, Andrea, and listening and asking great questions.

Andrea:
I’m so excited about this. And use that mock mill link in the? Yeah, thank you for reminding me. Don’t send the mock mill link to somebody. You’ve got to send them the ancestral kitchen link. I feel like I’ve said it a bunch of times now, and so now people message me and they’re like, hey, I used your link. yes thank you thank you it’s such a score when they do that so thank you everybody who’s been doing that and telling us you’re using it

Alison:
Okay wonderful okay let’s head over to the after show see you on the other side bye