(Photo: the leading international group “Les Ambassadeurs du Pail” make milling in the bakery (of secondary, variety-bringing ingredients) a mail part of their courses.)
Enhancing your wholegrain sourdough baking with fresh milling!
You’ve discovered now the remarkable difference that sourdough baking makes to your bread-loving experience. Sourdough (I call it long-fermented) bread baked at home is so different from the bread you can buy that most of us sourdough bakers simply avoid the commercial stuff altogether.
With a full understanding of how much difference a choice of leavening makes to baking with packaged flours, allow me to tempt you with some stories about the next step up: fresh milling.
It has only been about 130 years since the industrialization of milling began.
Before that, people were “close to their grains”, knowing them as fresh food that required handling as such. Now, there is a revolution on, and home (and professional!) bakers are learning that owning a mill can make “the next big difference”.
Let me go through the most basic advantages, with the promise that I’ll gladly tell more. 😊
The first great advantage of home milling is that freshness that you get, and can only get, when you weigh out the amount of your ingredients (in the form of grains) and transform them yourself into flour, just-in-time. You’ll first notice the wonderful aroma of the milled foods, a pleasure you’ll want to keep enjoying. That aroma, lost if you wait after after milling to use the flour, will go right into your dough and come out in your bread. I promise you’ll find it just *wonderful*!
It has only been about 130 years since the industrialization of milling began.
Before that, people were “close to their grains”, knowing them as fresh food that required handling as such. Now, there is a revolution on, and home (and professional!) bakers are learning that owning a mill can make “the next big difference”.
The second great advantage is that you know you always have the *whole* food. The power now in your hands enables you to begin enjoying nutrient-dense foods the way Nature intended: eating all the fiber that She always includes if foods from which we can directly derive glucose. That fiber, after all, is there to feed the bacteria in our gut microbiome. Without it, our system falls out of balance, and disease ensues. You’ve probably read of late that hardly any of us is regularly consuming the amount of fiber that is recommended. And by the way: that fiber holds most of the grains’ flavor!
(Photo: examples of the various flours one can make. Here field corn (maize), spelt, millet, buckwheat…)
The third big advantage is that you get to start employing the full plethora of Nature’s millable foods in your breads. What options for your creative spirit!
So go for the huge array of grains available:
- Cereals (wheats, barleys, ryes, rices, oats, corn, sorghum, millet, teff)
- Pseudocereals (buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa, Cañahua)
- Pulses (Beans, lentils, chickpeas, peas, lupin, soybeans)
I like to use grains other than wheat and rye in my pre-ferments, and then I have tons of fun. I even mill oilseeds (not too much!) in with the dry grains.
(Photo: A collection of ingredients to make for highly nourishing, fantastically tasty breads. Take your choice! )
Makes for better nutrition and fabulous flavor!
Anita has kindly invited me to send her group missives from time to time as my own sourdough journey continues. So I hope we’ll be in touch this way, and that you’ll all be soon enjoying whole grains and other freshly milled foods the way I do!
Paul Lebeau – The Mockmill Man
P.s. if you are interested in gluten-free miling, you can find a special bonus in the Gluten-free Masterclass on how to use a stone mill at home.
Click here and discover Anita’s sourdough simplified way of baking. And improve your life and diet. In less time and withh less effort.