I recently bought a home flour mill and I’m looking to take the whole wheat berries, mill them, then sift the milled flour down into what white bread flour. I have no idea how to go about this. I realize I need sifters, but what kind? How fine to mill my wheat? How do I know what % of the total weight to sift out? Any articles or resources would be helpful. Thank you!
Those are good questions for a beginning home miller. I don’t know all the answers, but what I know about sifting flour has come from web searching, reading bread books, and particularly from searching on thefreshloaf.com and the Breadtopia forums, as well as just milling and baking.
A key term is “extraction rate.” It’s kind of backward: the extraction rate is the percentage of the original grain weight that passes through your sieve. If you begin with 100 grams of milled wheat berries and you end up with 90 g of flour and 10 g of bran, you have “extracted” that flour from that bran at a 90% extraction rate.
Breadtopia and maybe other sources are back ordered on sieves right now, but I just obtained a 40 mesh one somewhere else online. If you only get one sieve, that is a popular fineness to have. “Mesh” refers to the number of holes per inch in the screen. At a fairly fine (not the finest) setting on my mill, my new sieve gave me about 85% extraction from some rye berries and 92% extraction from some wheat berries. Each type of grain breaks differently and has different bran brittleness and flexibility.
Trial and error with your grain and your mill and whatever kitchen sieve or strainer you have will teach you something. I have gotten good mileage out of a Krona Norpro strainer we’ve had for years. It has about a 32 mesh, I judge from holding it over a ruler and squinting. As you gain experience and read more you’ll find more questions to ask.
One more thing to say is that to replicate commercial bread flour or all purpose flour by home milling is difficult indeed. Industrial roller mills take grain berries apart in a way one cannot do with a home mill. Plus, they blend different wheats to produce the combination of properties they want in their product. Nonetheless, in my limited experience, by sifting out much of the bran from grain berries I get a refined flour that mixes into dough and bakes differently from whole grain home milled flour. You may not replicate King Arthur bread flour or whatever, but you’ll make some fine bread and have good adventures doing so.
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That was EXTREMELY helpful. I may opt to continue buying organic bread flour from my grocer and just mill the whole grain portions of my bake until I gain a little more confidence in both my bread making technique and experience with the home milling. I intend to use a very high percentage of whole grain flours in my baking, so I’ll get the benefit of the home milling. My goal is the best possible texture I can get from whole grains and without the use of add gluten.
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Good luck! I should have also mentioned that all purpose flour and maybe bread flour too represents a 70-75% extraction from the original grain. Gives you a benchmark. By mixing freshly milled wholegrain flour and white flour you are simulating some intermediate extraction rate. For example, 70% wholegrain flour and 30% white flour would give you approximately the equivalent of high extraction flour at a 92.5% rate if the white flour clocks in at 75% extraction.
Also note, regarding crumb texture, that German and Eastern European bread traditions include a lot of dense bread. The absence of large gas bubbles solidified in the baked loaf is not necessarily a failure.
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Thanks again Tony! I’m curious, as you mill at home, what do you mill and how do you use it? What is your bread baking approaches with your home milled flours?
I’ve been baking bread since 2003 or so – can’t remember exactly when. I guess I’ve been influenced the most by books by Jeffrey Hamelman, Dan Leader, Bernard Clayton, and Joe Ortiz. My home is in New England, but I have family and friends in Northern California. “San Francisco Sourdough French Bread” is everywhere there, and I wanted to make my own. However, my wife is careful about what she eats and really wants wholegrain bread. From time to time I make white or whitish bread, but most of the time I make bread that’s 70%-100% wholegrain.
In the past couple of years I’ve been working through several books by Lutz Geißler (see ploetzblog.de). My mill is from Austria, and that got me realizing that the German bread tradition is maybe more rich and complex than the French one. I wanted to learn more about it. Hence, after a couple of Austrian books, I found my way to Lutz. I don’t know much German, but just enough to stumble through the recipes.
As for the grain that I mill and the flour that I bake with, it’s wheat, rye, and spelt, for the most part. Recently I bought a some Einkorn berries and durum wheat berries because I’ve liked the semolina bread I’ve made occasionally, and once in a while I make pasta with it. There are a lot of combinations of rye, wheat, and spelt you can make, including ones in which one or two of the grains have zero proportion. The possibilities multiply when one, two, or all of the grain’s flour is refined by sifting to some extraction. No limit baking! – what keeps it interesting.
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I am humbled! You are indeed an advanced baker. I have been baking regular yeast breads without much technique for the last 20 years, infrequently. The pandemic got me working with sourdough, and I am now learning how to make sourdough in our Houston climate, adjusted for all the oddities of our heat and humidity. Shaping bread is still new to me. (Bye bye pans. Hello bannetons.) A lot of trial and error. Like your wife, I want to be eating whole grains. Partly due to the broader nutrition profile, partly due to the more interesting flavor, and partly due to the mere challenge of it. Before I dive deeper into denser Eastern European breads, I really want to get to at least an intermediate level with more typical French/Italian type bread baking, to include breads with whole grains added in.
My wife, who lived in Northern California in the hippie days when the I Ching was popular, says most of the I Ching stories boil down to, “Perseverance furthers.” In other words, keep at it. Being homebound in the virus time, I’ve been reading more about bread and viewing more bread videos on YouTube . There are numerous portrayals of loaf shaping there. A good place to start, I think, is the series by Gesine Prado and Jeffrey Hamelman, The Isolation Baking Show. Episode One is here. Tons of descriptions of making and maintaining sourdough on the WWWeb, too, in text, pictures, and video. There are good discussion threads on the Breadtopia forums about shaping, sourdough and much else, as you’ve probably seen.
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The short answer is, you can’t. White flour comes from a roller mill, which completely strips the bran and grain from the endosperm. A stone mill doesn’t do that. If you want white flour, just buy it.
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An update for you. I did get a Mockmill and start grinding my own WW. While I have not got through the trouble of sifting to make my own white bread flour, I did sift my WW flour that I used in bake. I added my sifted WW flour to the bread flour, combined them, then gently added the sifted bran back into the mix. That produces better results than simply mixing your unsifted WW flour right into a dough,.
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Enjoy your new mill. Indeed, if you give gluten a chance to form in the absence of bran, or some of it, you can add the bran back in afterwards. Some scald the bran with some boiling water first and leave it to soak before adding it to the dough. In my experience, handling the dough gently but firmly is all that is needed for pretty-good dough structure. Currently, I’m milling grain berries at a fairly coarse setting, sifting out the larger pieces, re-milling them at a finer setting, sifting again, and re-milling what stays in the sieve a third time at the same fine setting. In the end, it all goes into the dough. The bran bits are smaller and seem to do less harm to the gluten network. It sounds like a lot of work, but the bran goes through the mill pretty quickly (and more quietly!).
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That does not sound like a lot of work at all. That’s a really smart idea! I’m going to try that. Are you blending this flour with white bread flour? Or making 100% whole grain breads?
I usually mix and bake whole grain bread. In recent months if I make a more or less white bread I use all purpose flour from our food co-op bulk bin and add 5-10% whole rye and 20% whole spelt or whole wheat for a country French loaf, the whole grains freshly milled.
A book I recently got, Dan Leader’s Living Bread, asserts that if you are going to the trouble of milling your own flour you ought to go all the way and use no commercial flour at all. Or, the author sort of says that. Now that I have a 40-mesh sieve (prompted by Leader and the link I’m about to put in) I make my own high extraction flour (meaning sifting out less bran than commercial white flour does) rather than blending in 20-30% white flour to the dark flour I mill myself. For more on home milling, you can suss out proth5, bwraith, and some others on thefreshloaf.com. This post, http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/7184/flour-lab-test-results, discusses re-milling and influenced my use of my new sieve.
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I realize I’m a bit late to this thread, but wanted to chime in. If I’m using a high percentage of whole grains, I usually soak (or scald, depending how much time I have) the bran before adding it back into the dough – not because I find it necessary for gluten development (I agree with @tstavely that it isn’t), but because it softens the bran in the baked loaf. I don’t mind a bit of texture in my bread, but my husband enjoys a soft crumb.
Before I purchased my mill, I too pored over the referenced postings on TFL and tried some of their techniques. (Some of them just weren’t practical for my situation and probably never will be.) For a long time after I got my mill, I always sifted and re-milled. One day when I was feeling lazy, I just set my mill to the final setting and sifted it with a finer screen. I didn’t do any side by side measurements or taste tests, but I didn’t notice any difference in the bread and neither did anyone else, so I stopped sifting and re-milling. Some time later, I read in Trevor Wilson’s e-book that while finer grains absorb water faster, coarser particles retain it longer. He recommended mixing a percentage of coarsely ground flour in with the finer grind for a moister, longer-lasting loaf. Made total sense, so I went back to sifting and re-milling, only now I set aside about 10%-20% of the coarse ground flour for use in the dough. I re-mill all of the bran, though, and soak it.
Home milling has taught me a great appreciation for professional millers. There’s a lot more involved than just pouring in the berries and catching the flour as it comes out of the spout. Technically, commercial flours are superior in so many ways to what you can produce at home. Acknowledging that, I would never give up my mill. The variety and freshness are very much worth my time and effort (in no small part because I’m at a point in my life where I have the time and energy to devote to it) and I find that the art and science involved are endlessly fascinating. Milling my own wheat has made me a better baker in every respect because it forced me to pay attention to my dough in ways I hadn’t done before.
As an aside, I went on a bread book buying bender about a month or two ago and wasted a lot of money on books I’ll never look at again. Leader’s Living Bread is the notable exception. I haven’t made any of the breads in it, but I love reading it and have gleaned some good insights and useful tips from it.
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I use Breadtopia’s #4 sifter. For my 1000gm flour amount in my sourdough bread, I leave 2-300 grams unsifted. Bran cuts the bubbles in sourdough, thus a denser bread. If not making sourdough, then a good kneading machine and non-sifted whole grain fresh milled flour can be used and bake withing several hours of milling.