I've been grinding much of my own flour lately, but I have a question for the more experienced millers here.

Do you pick over the grain before you mill it? I've been carefully picking it over first to remove grains that still have the hull on them, small seeds of some unidentified type, stones, and the occasional piece of field corn. 14# of spelt produced a couple of tablespoons (at most) of this mixed detritus, so I'm wondering if I'd have even noticed if I'd just left it be.

I'm using a hand-crank mill made by Porkert. It produces a pretty coarse flour that works best when soaked overnight, but the price was right ($60.50). On the other hand, picking over adds a lot of time to a process that's already slow by nature; I have to run the flour through 3 times to get it to a fineness I can live with.

Thanks for any advice anyone cares to offer!

edh

In order to fine tune my milling and sifting process, I ran a series of tests at different mill coarseness settings to see which setting might result in the best separation of bran from endosperm. I then ran a successive reduction multi-pass milling and sifting process at what appeared to be the best first pass settings and sent samples of all these tests to CII Labs to see what some of the ash content, protein content, and dough rheology might be.

Below is a photo of my third attempt at home milling and sifting, which resulted in a flour very similar to my favorite "high extraction flour", Heartland Mills Golden Buffalo flour. The processes used on my second and third tries are explained further below. Additional photos of the process have been posted.

Hello Everyone

 My girlfriend and I are thinking about trying to bake bread and other things using flour that we have made ourselves. Does anyone know of a recipe book conataining recipes for home milled flour that would be appropriate for begginers like us?

Thanks alot

Johannes

This relatively recent article  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1980288.ece discussed Poilane's use of 'grey flour', how good it is for you, etc. Along with thoughts that steam injection is a relatively 'new' invention for us in bread baking and the 'old' french breads did not use this 'technology'...