Why milling flour at home might be worth your time

I’ve been milling flour at home for almost two years now, and the benefits are absolutely worth exploring.

Once upon a time bakers used to be able to go to a local miller and get fresh flour to use in their breads. It’s really neat seeing videos of nonnas in Italy making their pasta and when asked, they’ll gesture somewhere behind them, “Over there,” when asked where their flour came from. Sadly, most of us, especially in the US don’t have the luxury of getting flour that cracking fresh. Shoot, who even knows how old our flour is after shipping and sitting on shelves?!

Thankfully home grain mills can fill in the gap and get us closer to the fresh flour of yore.

With a home grain mill, you can get access to the freshest flour possible, brimming with nutrients that haven’t expired yet. You get complete control over the quality of the grains and the type of grains that you use. Love ancient grains like spelt, einkorn, and emmer? You can mill that!

Consider this post as a primer into all the benefits that milling flour at home can give you + some fresh milled flour recipes to get you started. You will never think about flour the same way!

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Benefits of milling flour at home

Nutrition of fresh flour

Flour is a processed food. From the second that it is milled, it starts to oxidize and lose nutrients.

Over time and exposed to air, flour will naturally bleach (hence unbleached flour). This natural oxidizing process also improves the quality of the gluten, making for stretchier, more stable crumbs in the final bread. This natural oxidation process takes up both time and physical space, making unbleached flour more expensive.

Flour companies who don’t want to wait for the flour to naturally may add quick oxidizing agents to the flour to speed up the process. These agents are chemicals like benzoyl peroxide, chlorine and other additives that improve the quality of the flour’s elasticity. Usually in this process, synthetic B vitamins that were stripped out in the flour making process are added back in. Originally, this was done to improve the nutrient profile of flour to avoid nutritional deficiencies.

As noble of an idea, chemistry is not better than nature. Typically, these chemical processes make for a well, chemical tasting flour. I can always taste it, and it’s never good.

When you use freshly milled flour, you get none of that ick. All the B vitamins, iron, and fiber that are naturally in your grain to start out with are there when you mill your flour. There are times when I sift out the bran (usually with soft wheat) for textural purposes, but in general I leave it in.

Taste and texture

Food really likes to be fresh. We’ve all that experience of eating a ripe tomato right off the plant. There’s nothing like that sweet sun-soaked flavor. Take that same tomato inside and let it hang out on the counter for a day or God-forbid put it in the fridge, and that taste is significantly less.

The same holds true for grains. I used to think that whole wheat flour was gross. It’s always tasted bitter to me. What I’ve learned milling my own wheat is that freshly milled wheat is actually quite sweet. What I was tasting in all of the whole wheat flour I bought before was likely rancidity.

This makes sense. Flour like every other plant starts to oxidize immediately after milling. The bran in wheat is high Vitamin E, a nutrient that easily oxidizes. I know my Gram store her wheat bran in the freezer for my Pop’s cereal in the morning just for this reason.

Another thing you gain from milling at home is complete control over texture. I love making traditional pumpernickel, which is a bread that requires the use of not flour but cracked rye. It can be difficult to find cracked rye, but I can buy whole rye berries and adjust the level of texture in my milling on my mill.

It’s fun playing around with these kinds of textures. You don’t always have to milling perfectly fine flour to get good bread!

Milling flour at home for variety’s sake

There are so many cool grains out there, but we encounter so few of them on store shelves.

Ancient grains like emmer, spelt, einkorn and many others all have unique tastes and nutritional profiles that are worth exploring. And while it can be expensive to buy any of these as flours, as whole berries, these grains are not outrageously priced.

The people of my ancestry are rye eaters. To me it’s unthinkable to eat certain meals without rye bread, yet it’s become more difficult over my lifetime to find good quality rye flour. Now I can flip a switch and mill the perfect rye flour I want.

I am not a purist here. When I first started milling, I had these dreams of milling EVERYTHING at home. This is both unrealistic and not possible. Yet even just dipping your toe into the waters of milling allows you to incorporate more interesting grains into your baking.

Knowing what’s in your flour

Besides synthetic chemicals that might be hanging around your flour if it is bromated, there may be other nasties from conventionally grown wheat. The worst is probably glyphosate, aka Roundup.

Until, hopefully this likely carcinogenic herbicide gets banned, milling flour at home can be an easy way to ensure that your flour is clean.

I’m lucky to live near a natural foods store where I can get organically grown grains. Additionally, there are many farmers within a couple hundred miles of me whose grain I can buy.

Being able to both support local farmers and worry a little less about what’s in my flour is worth the learning curve that comes from milling my own grain.

Can you save money milling flour at home?

Yes and no. A home grain mill is definitely an investment. I chose my Komo Fidibus because they’re very sturdy and built to last. Built to last came with a price though!

After you purchase a mill though, whole grains have a better shelf life than flour. If you keep them in dry storage buckets in their original packaging in a cool area of your home, whole grains can last for years.

Not so with flour. I grew up for part of my life in Texas, and in the warm parts of the year, we would have to check our flour for weevils. Let me tell you that is a gross experience I’ve never had to deal with since.

You’ll also save money if you’re a person who likes more exotic flours like red fife, ancient grains, etc. Whole grains are almost always less expensive than the flour made from the same grain.

Milling at home is fun

My family all LOVES using my mill. Sometimes I have to be sneaky about weighing out my grain because my kids all want to flip the switch.

There’s something about the process of watching the whole grain go in the top and flour out the bottom that is genuinely satisfying.

Once you taste the difference between a freshly milled wheat bread and a bread made from old rancid bagged wheat flour, you’ll never want to go back. Some of the worst moments in my family’s life center around the fragrance of my bread wafting through the house, then waiting for my bread to cool. When I call them down into the kitchen when that terrible time has passed, it’s pure joy watching my kids slice into a fresh loaf. And that joy is worth everything to me.