USING LOCALLY-GROWN, LOCALLY-MILLED FLOUR

In addition to the social and economic reasons for buying local, our flour is more flavorful and nutritious than anything you can get in the supermarket.  When we get time, we’ll add some documentation for the better nutrition.  The reason it’s more nutritious is that supermarket flour has been processed to remove the most nutritious parts (germ and bran) because the germ contain oils that may eventually go bad at room temperature. and the bran particles make the flour a little coarse   After processing, supermarket four is bleached using bromine to make it whiter.  Finally, having removed the most nutritious parts, industrial flour mills ‘enrich’ the flour by adding vitamins and minerals to partially replace those lost in removal of the bran and germ.  This is all a long-winded lead-in to our first recommendation:

1.  Store it in the freezer.  This keeps it fresh, and prevents the oils released in the milling process from slowly going bad.  That said, the flour will keep on the shelf for six weeks or more, and in the fridge for an even longer time).

Our other recommendations are:

2.  Use a little less liquid in making batters and doughs.  Small stone mills don’t grind the flour as finely as do the big commercial mills, so they don’t take up liquids quite as quickly or as much.

3.  Use a little less shortening.  Nonie finds that in making pie crusts she uses only half as much shortening as she would using store-bought flour.

4.  Don’t believe everything  you hear about differences between bread flour and pastry flour.  There are differences, to be sure, and when we get time, we’ll add some more information about this.  Our main point is that, unless you are a commercial baker, or demand really light, fine textured, fluffy bread, our soft white wheat flour makes pretty darn good bread that has a lot more intrinsic flavor than anything made with bread wheat that  we’ve tasted yet.  It has so much flavor, in fact, that we generally mix our ‘pastry’ flour 50:50 with bread flour to make the bread flavor a little milder.

5.  If you must, you can remove some of the bran by sieving and sifting using an old-fashioned flour sifter or a kitchen strainer.

6.  E-mail us to let us know if you’ve discovered other differences between real flour and the store-bought stuff.