Baking Bread with Home Milled Flour

Why Milling Your Own Grain Changes the Loaf

There is a moment, usually around the third or fourth loaf, when the smell from the oven changes. It is sweeter, nuttier, more like toasted hazelnuts than the flat, dusty aroma of shop-bought wholemeal. That is the grain, not the recipe. Wholegrain flour starts losing its volatile oils and much of its aroma within days of milling, and a bag on a supermarket shelf may be months old. Mill a few hundred grams in the morning, bake in the afternoon, and you are cooking with something closer to a fresh ingredient than a store-cupboard staple. In a Peak District kitchen, where the wind rattles the sash windows and the range is often the warmest place in the house, that difference is worth the counter space.

Choosing and Keeping Grain

You do not need a field of wheat to do this. A few kilos of grain will keep you baking for months, and smallholdings around Bakewell, Hope and the Derwent Valley often have a neighbour with spare rye or spelt going cheap after harvest.

• Modern bread wheat gives you the gluten strength for a well-risen tin loaf. Look for a strong breadmaking type, not feed wheat.
• Spelt is forgiving on poor soils and gives a softer, more extensible dough. Handle it gently — it tires quickly.
• Rye is the upland grain. It will not rise like wheat, but it makes a dense, sour, keeping loaf that suits a cold morning.
• Oats are not really a bread grain, but home-milled oat flour makes superb parkin, flapjack and bannocks.

Store grain in airtight bins somewhere cool, dark and dry. Grain needs to be below about 14 per cent moisture to keep, so never leave it sitting in a damp shed. If you buy in bulk, decant into smaller containers so you are not opening the same sack all winter.

Milling at Home Without Fuss

A small stone mill or a high-speed impact mill will both do the job. Stone mills run cooler and give a slightly coarser, more characterful flour; impact mills are faster and finer but warm the grain, so mill in short bursts and let the flour rest. Either way, mill only what you need for the next week or two.

Set the stones coarser than you think for bread. A little grit and bran is not a fault — it is the point. Very fine wholemeal can turn to paste and give you a brick. Start at a middle setting and work finer once you know how the dough feels.

The Water Question

This is where most first attempts go wrong, and it has nothing to do with your milling. Home-milled wholemeal absorbs far more water than white flour, partly because the bran soaks it up and partly because freshly milled flour is thirstier still. A recipe written for strong white flour at 65 per cent hydration may need 75 or even 80 per cent with your own flour.

So do not trust the numbers in the book. Start with less water than you think you need, mix, then add more a splash at a time until the dough feels right: soft, slightly tacky, but not sticking to your hands in sheets. Give it twenty minutes to rest before you judge it — wholemeal needs time to hydrate, and what looks dry often turns slack once the bran has drunk its fill. Keep a note of what you used, because next month's grain will be different again.

A Simple First Loaf

This makes one 800g tin loaf. It is deliberately plain, so you can taste the flour.

• 500g freshly milled wholemeal bread flour
• 350g tepid water, plus extra for adjusting
• 10g fine salt
• 7g dried yeast, or 100g active sourdough starter
• A little oil or butter for the tin

Mix the flour and water roughly and leave it covered for half an hour — this rest does more for wholemeal bread than any amount of kneading. Add the salt and yeast, then knead for ten minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. It will stay slightly sticky; resist the urge to keep adding flour.

Prove somewhere warm for about an hour and a half, until roughly doubled. Shape into the tin, prove again for forty-five minutes to an hour, then bake at 220°C for fifteen minutes before dropping to 200°C for a further twenty-five to thirty. The loaf should sound hollow when tapped underneath, and read about 95°C in the middle if you have a thermometer. Cool it on a rack — cutting hot bread ruins the crumb.

Through the Seasons

Baking with your own flour ties you to the year in a way that bags from the shop never do. Autumn grain is moist and bakes heavy; by late winter it has dried and your dough will want more water. In summer, warm kitchens push the rise faster, so cut the yeast slightly or use cooler water. Rye suits the dark months, wheat and spelt the lighter ones. Every sack is a slightly different flour, and that is not a problem to solve — it is the whole pleasure of it.