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My family loves this no knead fresh milled wheat bread.

You’ll love that you can mix it up, leave it to rest and marvel as it comes together with almost no work on your part. It’s an easy, beautiful loaf that’s simple

This is a great recipe to get used to the taste of freshly milled flour. Because there is still unbleached flour in the mix, this loaf has a nice light texture. Sometimes as bakers we can get frustrated by the dense nature of loaves with 100% whole grain. I love those kind of loaves, but it can be a hard sell for others in your family who want lovely springy bread with happy airy crumbs.

This recipe then is a good compromise for anyone wanting to try out freshly milled flour but someone who still wants the end result to taste like the homemade bread you dream about.

No Knead Fresh Milled Wheat Bread

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Should you age your flour?

There’s some controversy in the world of freshly milled flour about how fresh your flour should be when you use it.

When exposed to air and over the course of about 3 weeks, wheat flour naturally whitens. It’s a trade off though as some of the nutrition is also lost in that process. What you do gain in that time is that the gluten forming proteins in the flour tend to stabilize and produce a better, stretchy dough.

Un-aged flour can have unpredictable results. Some people claim that dough made with un-aged “green” flour can turn potentially slimy and become hard to handle. This can be due to the flour not absorbing liquid well when it is first milled. You can read more about that here and here.

Still, most of us wanting to use freshly milled flour are more concerned about keeping as much of the nutrient content of the grain intact as possible. That’s why I only really sift out the bran when I’m working with soft wheat.

In all my tests, I have found that yes, the freshly milled flour is a little weird with liquid. I’ve seen it seize up and feel extremely dense even with the same amount of water I’m used to in a standard bread recipe.

fresh milled wheat flour and white flour in bowls

I solve the problem by cutting my freshly milled flour (more honey colored flour above) with regular organic bread flour or organic unbleached all-purpose flour. This way I can get the taste I want from the fresh-milled flour but the predictability that comes with regular flour.

With this in mind, I can whiz my wheat berries through my mill and go right into making a couple loaves of bread.

No knead bread and the flour in freshly milled wheat bread

If you’ve never read Jeff Hertberg and Zoe Francois’ New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, it’s worth a read. The principle that their book and Jim Lahey’s My Bread is built on is that in the pursuit of good bread, we often work much harder than we need to.

Gluten strands that give dough its lovely texture can be either formed quickly in a kneading process or more slowly. In the slow process, you make up your dough and let it rest over a long period of time. In that time, you can perform a series of stretch folds to help the dough form some good texture. This involves scooping under the dough and folding it back on itself a few times.

Do that kind of stretch and fold a few times over 30-45 minutes, and you will have created all the structure most breads need to bake up into beautiful loaves. This process is very counter-intuitive but it works.

What I’ve noticed with my freshly milled flour is that this no knead approach is ideal. The freshly milled flour is as I mentioned a little weird with liquid. By letting it sit for a time, it has a chance to better absorb the water without me trying to force it to behave as I knead it.

Mill talk and what grain to use for fresh milled wheat bread

Mill options

I have a Komo Fidibus Mill which I realize is not the cheapest option or maybe the first thing you would want to try out of the gate. I like the stone mill stones for the texture this mill produces.

Other options:

Kitchen Aid Grain Mill Attachment: screws right on to your stand mixer.

Blendtec blender: If you already have a Blendtec as your regular blender, it does a decent job of grinding grain. I love mine for making powdered sugar.

The Kitchen Mill: Nice small-footprint mill.

Coffee grinder: A coffee grinder wouldn’t be my first choice for wheat as it’s pretty hard. If you’re just starting, though, give it a try, blending only about 1/3 cup of grain at a time. I ALWAYS use my coffee grinder for oats.

What grain should I use?

Hard red wheat or prairie gold wheat berries

I am using prairie gold wheat berries from my local natural foods store. As I understand it, it is not certified organic, but raised without chemicals.

It’s become always my preference to use organic grains as much as possible just to keep my family’s contact with chemicals lower.

You will need a gram scale for this recipe as using it is the easiest way to get the most consistent results.

No knead fresh milled wheat bread

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Total Time: 3 hours 5 minutes
Yield: 2 loaves

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Description

The taste of sweet fresh wheat in the best kind of sliceable sandwich loaf that comes together in a lazy morning.

Ingredients

Scale

2 1/4 cups warm water
1 tablespoon instant yeast or active dry yeast
2 tablespoons maple syrup or honey
2 tablespoons soft butter or olive oil plus more for greasing the pans
2 tsp salt
300 grams wheat berries (substitute equal weight of whole wheat flour)
400 grams bread flour (3 cups + 1 Tablespoon)

Egg wash

1 egg
1 tsp water

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Instructions

1. 1. First, mill the wheat berries on a fine setting (see note).
  2. Dissolve the yeast in a little bit of the warm water with the maple syrup. When it is foamy, add the rest of the water, and the rest of the ingredients. Stir to form a shaggy dough.
  3. Cover the dough and let it rest for 15 minutes.
  4. Stretch folds: Scrape under the bottom of the dough, then fold it over on itself towards the center of your bowl. Do this 4 or 5 times, then cover for another 15 minutes.
  5. Do another set of stretch folds from step 4, then rest for another 15 minutes.
  6. Perform one last round of stretch folds. By this time, the dough should easily form into a ball, Cover and allow the dough to rise until it’s doubled in size, about 1 hour.
  7. Brush some soft butter or olive oil in the bottom and sides of two 9″x5″ loaf pans.
  8. Divide the dough into two pieces. On a lightly floured surface, cut one half of the dough into 3 pieces with a bench scraper or serrated knife. Pinch the top together, then braid the pieces together.
  9. Pick up the braid and place it to rise in one of the prepared pans.
  10. Repeat with the second piece of dough.
  11. Cover the loaves to rise for about 30 minutes. They should be just puffing up near the rim of the pan.
  12. While the loaves rise, preheat the oven to 350 F (180C).
  13. Optional egg wash: Whisk 1 egg with 1 tsp water to create an egg wash. Just before the loaves go in the oven, brush on the egg wash with a pastry brush. Sprinkle the loaves with poppyseeds, sesame seeds or flax seeds or a combination of all three.
  14. Bake the bread for 45-50 minutes until golden brown and hollow sounding when you rap the bread with your knuckles. If it looks like the loaves are getting too brown as they bake, cover them with foil after about 20 minutes into the baking time.
  15. If you have an instant-read thermometer, the bread should read 200 degrees F when you test the temperature in the center of the loaf.
  16. Let the bread cool completely, then slice and enjoy.

Notes

What mill should I use? I have a Komo Fidibus mill I bought from Pleasant Hill Grain, though I have a good friend who swears by her Nutrimill. For this recipe, I set it to the finest grind. If you want a little texture, you can adjust accordingly. Just be sure to use DRY wheat berries in your mill.

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Additional Time: 2 hours
Cook Time: 50 minutes