Two Years with a Nutramill

I’m 74 and grew up eating toast for breakfast.    As I have aged it seems what passes for bread does not agree with me.    Specifically there were too any trips to the bathroom at night and i blamed these on too much folic acid.    (Apparently the folic acid in bread seems to come from China but this is a different story.)    

Anyway I decided to make my own bread. I purchased a Classic Nutramill.  and some hard red wheat berries.    I used a bread machine and proceeded to make a number of bricks until some internet searching led me to mix Bob’s Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten to the flour.    I use about 1 tablespoon per cup of flour.   This solved the bricks problem.     I always grind the flour fresh as the nutritional value is reduced as the flour ages.  Some nutrients can disappear in 3 days.    

Next I tried stoping the brand machine after the first rise and then putting the dough in a bread pan to be baked in a toaster oven.    This eliminated the hole in the bottom of the loaf as well as giving me a lighter crust.   Also bread machines use teflon coated bread pans and i prefer baking the bread in a non teflon pan.   It is worth the extra time it takes.    

Somewhere along this way i encountered Einkorn grain a very old form of grain.    I ordered 10 pounds of it and before it was gone  noticed slight improvements in my vision.   This lead me to a 35 pound order of organic einkorn  wheat berries and now i am near the end of this batch.    Again it seems that my vision is very slowly improving and on bright days i find I can read with out my glasses.     This is all very strange but this is what is happening.     

In addition to my vision improvements it appears there are other benefits.   One is when i started i lost 20 pounds and 2 inches off my wast  without trying.      Now about half the weight has come back but my wast has not changed much.    I’ve also noticed  a reduced craving for junk food and a lot more fiber in my diet.  Perhaps  there is a mix of vitamins we get in wheat germ that is of real value.     

My Nutramill has clogged a few times but this can be fixed by using with a air compressor to blow air up through the machine and then turn it on to clean out the machine.    

I’m not sure where all this will take me but it is definitely  a worthwhile change and if my Nutramill died tomorrow i would not hesitate to replace it as soon as possible.