In a few weeks I plan to purchase a Mockmill (from Breadtopia) and start grinding my own flour. I am wondering the best way to get “white flour. Do bakers commonly just purchase white flour? Can I sift out the bran and germ (and if so, is it worth it)?
I am also wondering if I should proceed with caution when grinding/baking with Turkey Red, Red Fife, or other heritage grains? The Heritage Grain chapter in in Samuel Fromartz’ “In Search of the Perfect Loaf” mentions that Turkey Red should handled more delicately than more modern varieties, and Red Fife has high gluten levels.
The best tasting loaves I’ve baked have been from home-milled red fife berries when a friend milled some for me and I went home and baked with that fresh-milled flour the same day. Could have been a coincidence, but I have a feeling it was because the flour was so fresh.
You can’t really mill what is commonly referred to as “white flour” at home. “White flour” is produced with a special kind of mill called a roller mill which entirely separates out any bran and germ and leaves only the starchy endosperm as the end result. If/when you want to use that kind of flour in your baking, you have to buy it.
The closest you can get to it with your home mill is to mill whichever grain you want to use as finely as possible and then use the finest sifter you can get (Breadtopia sells a pretty fine one), maybe even sifting the flour twice. You’ll get something that is in between white flour and whole grain flour, both in color and in performance.
I have sifters, but since Breadtopia started selling bolted (aka sifted) flour, I’ve stopped using them and just buy their bolted flours now. For me, sifting is kind of a PITA - it takes a while and you end up with fine flour dust all over the place.
As far as proceeding with caution - my advice on this question with respect to everything to do with baking bread (i.e. this is my response to every question I read on these forums that starts with “Can I…”) is to throw all caution to the wind and try it out. The absolute worst case scenario is you get a bad loaf of bread. But even then you will have learned something valuable, so I’d count it as a win anyway. Every loaf is a science experiment to me, and while I have produced a lot of flat, ugly loaves of bread in my years, I’ve never once actually baked a loaf that was inedible and in fact even the ugliest of them usually taste great - better than anything you can buy in a store.
Well, first of all, I started to bake bread and then to mill my own flour to get away from eating unhealthy white flour. Of course many formulas call for bread flour and I do use this frequently, but I want my bread flour to retain at least some of the bran and germ, which means it needs to be stone ground. This can be achieved by bolting/sifting, but that ends up with a lot of waste and is quite time consuming (I do do this if a formula calls for high extraction flour), so normally I just use Anson Mills’ French Mediterranean White Flour. This is a delicious heritage wheat that is stone ground. I buy it by the 10 pound box and keep it in the fridge.