Remember that starting to grind fresh grain in your home should only be started after you have started cooking with the right fats! Getting the fats right is the most important change you can make in your kitchen.
Using fresh flour is a wonderful addition to your cooking repertoire as even the organic flours from the healthfood store or the ones shipped to your door are nutritionless and not worth the money. Once you grind flour, the nutrition is gone in about 3 days in an unrefrigerated situation. Freezing your flour right after grinding will preserve this nutrition for weeks, which is why you really need to do it yourself. As you can see from the video, flour can be used immediately right out of the freezer, so there is no disadvantage to freezing it.
Grain Requires Proper Preparation after Grinding
Delving into Traditional Eating for the first time inevitably uncovers the fact that modern methods for preparing grains and legumes can be extremely damaging to health over the long term particularly if numerous servings of these foods are consumed on a daily basis as recommended by conventional dieticians and nutritionists.
Even if you take the time and care to make your own bread at home with freshly ground grain, if you do not follow the centuries old traditions for eliminating anti-nutrients and maximizing the nutrition in the grain prior to baking, you could in fact be doing yourself and your family more harm than good. These methods are sour leavening, soaking, and/or sprouting.
But first, you must grind the grain! Below is the video how-to.
Grain Grinding Basics
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Sarah Pope has been a Health and Nutrition Educator since 2002. Her work is dedicated to helping families effectively incorporate the principles of ancestral diets within the modern household. She is a sought after lecturer around the world for conferences, summits, and podcasts.
Her work has been covered by major media including USA Today, ABC, NBC, and many others.
Hi Sarah,
First I want to thank you for all that you do. I am in my early 20s and did not know a thing about traditional preparation of grains until I came across your videos. I have been soaking oats and flour however only the stuff from the grocery store. I am really interested in grinding my own flour but am having trouble finding a place to buy the grain. Because I do not live close to a Bread Beckers location, it would be around $75 to have it shipped (which is more than I can stomach) and after much searching I have been unable to find another distributor close by.
I know you may not have much info but I thought I would ask just in case!
Thank you again!
Forgot to mention I live in Milwaukee, WI 🙂
Have you ever had weevils or other bugs in your wheat after long storage of 18 months?
Would you need to put it in the freezer for 48 hours before you put it in storage and ground it as needed?
What about those Einkorn wheat berries I’ve read about. Are they supposed to be low gluten and better for you than the hybrid wheats on the market?
Does it make any difference whether the grain is medium ground or fine ground? Are those lids you talked about available at the same place you buy your wheat? I used to buy whole wheat flour from a nurse about 50 miles from my home, but I lost her contact information and would like to start buying my own wheat and grinding it myself.
My late stepfather ran a grist mill that was over 100 hundred years old and it was water ground mill with the stones and he always ground his corn meal very fine and it made the best hoecake and pone bread I’ve ever eaten. He dressed the stones every so often to ensure they were working right and when he passed away in 1985, the meal has never been the same. He had gave up his lease on this mill and worked there until 1985, The state of Ga. moved it to the Ga. Agrirama, an old village from the 1800’s in Tifton, Ga and the mill is still there and running, but nobody knows how to grind the mill like he did.
It sometimes only takes one generation to lose the old ways and skills that existed for centuries.
P.S. do you have to soak sprouted grains that are ground into flour?