Do you need to age freshly milled flour? I am relatively new to baking sourdough and recently bought a mill and several types of wheat berries. I am seeing varying information on aging flour from not at all to 10 days and longer. What do most of you that mill your own grain do?
@jcheroki Good morning! I’m a fairly novice baker who uses Breadtopia’s organic high protein bread flour for my bread flour component to my dough and then I do mill a couple different wheat berries for the whole grain component of the recipe.
I honestly know nothing about the concept of aging flour. I don’t even know what that is! For health and safety all I do is place my bags of wheat berries in the freezer for at least 10 days before I use any of it. The only reason I do that is to kill any potential insect larvae that could be present in the grain before I use it. I use my freezer to completely store my wheat berries anyway so as I restock my supply of berries, they just sit in my freezer until I need them. When I’m going to bake I just remove the portion of berries I need for that single recipe. I spread them out on a platter or cookie sheet and let them come to room temperature before milling them. I have a Mockmill 100 stone mill and to protect the integrity of the stones so that mold doesn’t grow on the stones the grain can’t have any moisture on it before milling. All it takes is about 30 minutes for the grain to sit out on my counter to come to room temperature and any potential ice crystals to disappear. That’s pretty much the extent of how I handle the berries. I keep my bread flour in my refrigerator. Any additional bags are in my freezer with my berries.
I don’t know if that answers your question or not but honestly, that’s all I do.
Baking blessings to you,
Leah
Thanks Leah. If you are not having any problems with the flour then I probably don’t need to worry. I bought a Blendtec “Kitchen Mill”. Outside of being a noisy, somewhat messy process I haven’t had any problems with it.
Thanks
John
I think the fresher the better, so I mill right before I mix. I have a strong opinion that the flavor of fresh-milled flour is way, way better than flour from a store that has been sitting around for a while. In my experience that includes flour that hasn’t been sitting around for that long. Before I got my mill, I often bought milled flour from Breadtopia and I know that they mill to order in small batches so I’m pretty sure that the flour I got from them was never much more than a couple weeks old when I was using it. I think my just-milled flour that I use now tastes fresher, fuller, better than even that not-too-old flour I used to buy from them.
That said, I don’t know what the arguments are in favor of aging milled flour and I have never tried doing it myself with flour I milled.
In the documentation from the class I’m taking they say this:
“:A dough made with “green flour” can be wettish when it shouldn’t’ be. This is because the gluten fibers do not bond well and cannot absorb water as well as aged flour. The flour will initially take up the water but then later it releases the water and the dough can feel slimy or wet. This can happen with freshly ground or “green” flours. Dough made from “green” flour can be difficult to handle.”
Having relatively little experience I don’t know if the dough has these qualities or not. It is hard for me to determine what factors are causing problems and what is normal. I only recently switched from the flour I could purchase at the grocery to fresh ground. The flavor is much better, I get a denser loaf with much less oven spring.
@jcheroki In my opinion, the nature of fresh milled whole grains is that you’re going to have a denser loaf and less oven spring. I believe that’s because you’re getting the WHOLE grain when you freshly mill it. You’re getting the bran (the outer coating), the grain itself and the endosperm (the core seed of the grain). In commercially ground all purpose flour the bran is removed. It’s heavier and more dense. It takes more “oomph” from your sourdough to raise it and to produce an oven spring. BUT, a lot of nutrition and fiber (probably flavor, too) are in the bran. Eliminating it from the flour does reduce the nutrition of the flour. Yes, the resulting loaf will be denser with less oven spring. But the flavor and nutrition will be greater!
Baking blessings,
Leah
PS. I don’t have a clue what “green flour” is, LOL! I just know I totally enjoy my sourdough, named Cyril, and the loaves he bakes for me. I haven’t had any trouble handling the resulting dough.
I’m pretty sure I have a feeling that may be talking about milling freshly picked, uncured (green) berries. I’ve never worked with such grain. The only thing I buy and mill (and mostly what I think is commonly available) is fully dried / cured grains.
If it’s really talking about just freshly milled flour from dry berries, then I have not had anything like that at all in my experience. Fresh-milled flour works great, tastes great. It’s very different from the roller-milled flour you get from grocery stores and requires a whole different set of techniques to get good results with. But in my experience that has nothing to do with the freshness and everything to do with the inclusion of 100% of the bran and germ of the grain.
I mill a lot of my own flour and mix mostly or entirely whole grain dough. Some of it behaves as described in your quotation. Gradually, I’m reconciling myself to having to fold or shape with bowl scraper and bench knife some of the time. One of my baking books asserts that aged (like two weeks) flour has “better baking qualities.” Perhaps that means the gluten forms better and the flour holds water more or better. I’ve not bothered to test the benefits of properly aged flour, though, because the point of home milling for me has been better nutrition, no degradation of the germ of the grain. Difficult to handle or not, my dough usually bakes into good bread.
Paul, THAT answers my question about what “green flour” may be and that answer makes SO much sense to me! Thank you!
Leah
PS I’m since I’m NO nutritionist or food scientist I was just guessing on my flour comments, LOL!
The term “green flour” is just a commercial baker’s slang term for freshly milled flour. Keep in mind that this is flour with an extraction rate somewhere in the 72% or a little higher. This is your average white flour, as at least 28% of the bran and germ are removed. Not in general what home millers are looking for but what commercial bakers are.
Ageing the flour for two to four weeks allows it to oxidize. I’m not much of a chemist but basicly as the flour absorbs oxygen a hydrogen molecule transfers to sulfides in the flour to form disulfides. This in turn strengthens gluten. This process is often done commercially with bleaching agents so the flour can be used immediately. Again, not something any of us want no matter if we’re home millers or just buying AP flour at the store.
jcheroki gives a good description of what problems can come from using un-oxydized flour in post #4 and for a clearer version of what I’m describing above you can refer to Hamelman’s “Bread” 2004 version page 7.
Dave
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Thanks for the info @dave_r, that’s interesting.
I’d probably naively equate oxidation with spoiling. It would be interesting to do some side-by-side experiments with freshly milled 100% WG flour and aged 1 week, 2 week, etc. 100% WG flour to see what performance and flavor differences there are.
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Paul, bear in mind that we are talking about the difference between ultimate nutritional value, which the home miller is looking for and a nice loaf of bread that the weekly shopper is looking to take home from the store. The weekly shopper’s loaf will have had most of the nutrients removed when the bran and germ are taken away and then chemically added back. Hence the lable “enriched”.
When people started looking to bake “artisnal” breads they were looking for higher extraction flours (with more of the bran and germ left in) or were mixing in more whoiel wheat, rye etc. to replicate a country/hearth loaf. Most of us were not thinking in terms of home milling. I only knew of one person in the late 1970s that was home milling. He was way ahead of his time!
I your case, with all of the germ/bran still present, I think ageing could cause a problem depending on the oil content of the flour. With nutrition as the goal rather than production I’d stick with what you have and work to get the loaf that suits you.
Dave
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I have also seen reference to aging recently-milled flour in a post about Gerard Rubaud building a levain on the Farine blog. He mentioned that it takes several weeks for the protiens to stabilize for optimal gluten production. It seems to matter most for longer leavened breads where the gluten might break down before proofing is complete…
There is also a nice discussion about aging flour over on the Fresh Loaf site here:
Yup, I’m curious but pretty skeptical about whether there really is any benefit to aging home-milled whole grain flour.
I’m pretty happy with the fresh-milled WG loaves I bake. I don’t have a problem getting a good rise, good spring, crumb I’m happy with, etc. and I’ve never noticed my dough to feel slimy, wet, or difficult to handle.
Whole grain or even bolted / sifted high extraction flour (anything stone ground that still has a fair amount of bran and germ in it) really has to be handled very differently in my experience than roller-milled white flour. Once you grok the differences, consistently good results don’t seem difficult.
Dan, thanks for posting the link. Interesting that it’s from 2007 and the debate was already going on with home milling and ageing.
There’s a link in the Fresh Loaf thread that has an explanaton of aging flour. Again, this is factory milled flour with the bran/germ removed.
From page 8 in the link.
Natural aging occurs when freshly milled “green” flour is exposed to air for several weeks or more. In naturally aging flour, air is added to it. Air is a powerful
additive, causing two main changes. First, it whitens the flour. Second, it
strengthens the gluten that forms from flour.
The whole chapter can be found here.
Dave
Thanks for posting the book chapter Dave! I enjoy learning the background details related to bread baking.
Hi Paul, I don’t personally mill my own flour, so I defer to your experience. Also, I just read another old snippet on the “to age or not to age” question on the Farine blog (here: http://www.farine-mc.com/2015/09/grain-gathering-2015-dave-miller-on.html). The miller that is profiled in the post agrees with you specifically for whole grain flours. Perhaps the effects of the bran and germ are more dominant than protein oxidation in doughs made primarily with whole grain flours. If this is the case, perhaps flour aging applies mainly to more refined flours.
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I could be wrong, but isn’t oxidization the process that makes fats rancid? This would seem to me to be an issue for whole grain flours where the fat in the germ is intact. Isn’t that why we store our whole grain berries in the refrigerator or freezer? I always mill my grains right before baking. But I also have to admit that I have to keep my hydration on the low side, 66-75%, to have a manageable dough. Perhaps the “green” flour is the reason, but in any case, I’ll take better flavor and nutrition any day.
Interesting topic! Thanks for asking, jcheroki!
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I’m no expert, but germ oil rancidness is the concern as I understand these things. It would be good to know more about what the nutrition losses are in oxidized flour as compared to freshly milled.
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I’ve milled grains for decades. You want to use fresh milled flour soon, not aged, or it will lose lots of nutrients and go rancid, I used the entire milled flour in breads that are machine kneeded, thus a good soft loaf baked within several hours from baking. For sourdough bread you need to sift out most of the bran. I use Breadtopia’s flour sifter #4. So for my 1000gm flour amount I’ll allow 2-300grams be unsifted but much more and you’re asking for a denser loaf. Bran cuts the air bubbles, deflating. The Tartine 3 Bread book deals with sourdough whole grain, but autolyzing for a long period.