Home Milling Blues
The more I try and make sense of home milling with my new Mockmill, the more complex it gets!
My plan is to grind and separate out the bran by sifting. Then use the bran to make a 24 hour bran levain which gets added back to the main dough.
This works fine with commercial flour but is not working so well with Mockmilled flour. People say that you should get about 20% bran from the whole wheat flour, but they seldom say how to measure it. You need a sieve, and after reading old TFL posts from proth5 and bwraith I reckon you need a #40 sieve. Try this with shop flour and you will get 20% weight in your #40 sieve.
However, with the Mockmill things aren't so simple; near its finest setting (stones just touching before grain) I only got 9% retention. I had to slacken off quite a bit to get near 20%. And the setting was VERY critical!
- setting 4: 12%
- setting 4.5: 22%
- setting 5: 30%
(This with stones touching at setting 2.5).
I'm not even sure that setting 4.5/22% is reproducible and it definitely was different with spelt grain.
Of course the other problem is that if you back off the setting you are also getting a coarser flour fraction which you really need to regrind at the finest mill setting - slow, messy and prone to blockages.
I'm now starting to think that the best course of action is to forget the sifting and bran levain and just mill as fine as possible in one pass. Maybe if the bran particles are very small they won't be an issue anyway?
Any comments? Proth5 what is your current regime?
Lance
Why not forget the extraction for now. Grind the berries with a fine setting as use as is. Your starter and Levain will love the whole grain flour as is. I seldom extract and the bread is taste outstanding and is super nutritious.
Get comfortable with this first and then later explore other possibilities.
Dan
Oh. I recommend you grind on demand. The uncracked berries will last for many years, but once cracked open they loss nutrition and certain parts of the berry can go rancid. If you need 50g of wheat, measure out 50g, grind, and the reweigh. You should have exactly 50 flour. Try it and see...
I have similar comments.
Pick a setting that gives you close to the granulation you want on first pass, consistent with getting it done within a reasonable time and temperature increase. Make a few breads. If you still want to separate the coarse/bran fraction, pick a sieve size that will pass the flour through in a tolerably short period. If you don't get enough bran, consider tempering the kernels.
Charbono, teach me about tempering. I’m interested to learn.
Dan
I use the finest setting to grind Turkey Red or Spelt on the Mockmill and using a #40 I get 85% extraction. When using Hard White Spring I mill on fine and use it at 100% but I usually only use fresh milled flour at 20% of the total flour. I'm sure you'll find what works for you with some experimentation.
What drew me to home milling was certainly not the economics of it. Flour off the shelf at the store is far more economical than buying a bucket of berries shipped half way across the country. I wanted to use the freshest flour with all its nutritional components intact so extracting the bran and germ wasn't part of my plan. I think that attempting to achieve a result as standardized as commercial flour with a small home stone mill will always be difficult and perhaps frustrating. Commercial mills are using a system that gives them a much higher level of control over the end product than we can get with small stones and a limited range of adjustment. We're also handicapped by a lack of scale. We work with small lots of berries and have no or very limited ability to analyze the grain we're using. So a standardized product will be very difficult achieve. I'm willing to accept all of home milling's limitations for the flavor and nutrition that fresh flour always delivers. My expectation is not to achieve a wide range of products that can correspond with the standard types and grades of commercial flour. All I want is something good both in flavor and nutrition.
JustAnOldGuy said it well. I am completely in agreement.
Not to discourage sifting, but just be aware of our limitations.
BUT where home bakers can’t be excelled is our ability to take whole berries, mill them on-demand, and produce a product that is nutritious, tasty, and has a unique texture. The large commercial factories can’t match that.
Home milling is a giant step up in bread baking, IMO.
Danny
Well said Danny & The Old guy. All of this modern flour didn't come along until roller mills came in to use. You'd need a series of mills to extract and separate each portion.
I agree, if we wanted modern wheat without the flavor and nutrition of fresh milled, we wouldn't bother with home milling.
Thank you for all your replies to my original post. However, I believe that some of you have gone off at a tangent.
If you re-read my original post, I never said that I wanted to turn wheat grains into every flour known to man (or woman). All I want to do is grind and separate off the 20% fraction that is retained (or should be) by a #40 sieve.
This should be perfectly possible without a roller mill; there are several flour mills in the UK (and no doubt elsewhere) with stone mills that do just this to produce 85 or 81% flour (wheatmeal as it used to be known in the UK). As I understand it this is made by a single pass through the stones followed by sifting.
I was making the comment that this seems to be more difficult to do with a home mill.
I hope that clears up any confusion!
The tempering trial is underway.....
Lance
Point taken, maybe I did go off on, or at a tangent ("two great peoples separated by a common language" etc, etc...). I do agree that a home mill will be very challenging simply because of the scale of the stones compared to what would be found in a commercial stone mill that was working with a large, more or less uniform lot of grain and an automated bolting process. Now a question. For your tests did you start with a clean mill each time? I've found that my Mockmill, a mixer attachment type, retains a certain percentage of the milled grain on the stones.
No problem; breadmaking can encourage lively debate!
I didn't clean the mill each time; my test wasn't that scientific, but I've had pretty consistent results of a low bran fraction.
It is what it is, I guess. I'll just accept it. I'll just see if the tempering makes any difference.
Lance
A horse a piece. Another way of saying-same either way. I sifted my freshly ground hard red wheat flour the last 2 times-just enough to make 2 loaves each time. I did 2 passes of milling at the finest setting before sifting. My sifter was a hand-held, tambourine style( about 9 inches/23cm diameter x 2 in./5cm deep) with a 40 screen(I think it's a 40-it is not marked but seems fine). Let me tell you-it added at least an hour and my poor hand and wrist were very stressed. I didn't measure my yield as I started to not care! Fine sifting is not for the weak of joint!
Here is the reason I opened with "same either way". When all was said and done, I used the bran to feed my levain and added some back into the loaf as a soaker. So why go to the bother of sifting if all I'm doing is adding it back? Why not incorporate the soak that's needed right into the recipe?
However, if you want to obtain some bran for dusting on loaves or in the bottom of the pan or for whatever-mill at the next-to-smallest setting and sift away. That is how I got the best yield of bran. Then I did another pass of the remaining flour at the finest mill setting. I never noticed a difference doing a 3rd pass.
My recommendation to you is to sift for a particular recipe but you don't need to do it every time you mill. It is a lot of work for little return. I am developing my recipes so that I use a soaker and a biga or preferment so almost every bit of WW flour is allowed a good long soak. I don't aim for a full-of-holes lean bread-mine are mostly denser, moist, non-crumbly sandwich loaves with the full nutrition available from the WW berries and natural leaven.
I have the Mockmill driven by the Kitchenaid mixer and I have learned that you can crank the setting passed the finest setting on this mill for the finest flour. It doesn't sieve much bran at that setting and at this setting it tends to walk itself to a coarser setting if you don't watch it. Great flour!
So keep experimenting and bake some delicious fun!
An hour is a lot of sifting time! I only mill 300 - 500g of grain in one go. Including the sifting and cleaning up it takes me about 15mins. I always manage to get a good covering of snowdust on the floor and worktop!
I liked the idea of the separate bran fraction to use for a bran levain as current thinking seems to be that this is the best way to process the bran, from the bread's and body's point of view (Kati Katina's work).
Lance
in my levain build. I am getting a much more active levain!
my process is to mill once on about setting 6 on my mockmill 100, sieve through a kitchen sieve then remill the sieved flour again on the finest setting.
Last time the bran portion from the first pass through the mill gave enough bran for the 2nd to last build. It was quite coarse in texture. This build was left 12 hours on the bench so the bran had really softened before the last AP flour build. My thoughts were that this may reduced any damage to the gluten structure.
It didn’t take too long to do this at all. and yes, my mockmill also retains a little flour and I haven‘t yet worked out % of bran produced this way - now on my list to do. I am still learning about milling.
happy milling Lance
Leslie
Good to hear of another baker working along the same lines, Leslie!
I need to persuade you (and any other budding sifters!) to buy a #40 sieve, eg This One (in the 20cm size) so we can all be working to the same spec regarding bran fraction.
Lance