Right kind of grain to mill for Italian loaf?

You can read my blog on this very subject - just search for proth5 and you will find it in short order. Yes, I have done it.

There is a lot that goes into milling white flour, including adjusting the falling number, aging, etc. that we manage to avoid with the whole grain type flours.

Extraction rates are pretty low and hand sifting will be a lot of work.  You can purchase commercial sifters for home use, but that will be a significant investment in $$$ and space.

My judgement is that there is little advantage in terms of taste (unlike more whole wheat flours) for the effort involved.  I buy white flour and am grateful for the miller(s) who produce it.

Hope this helps.

I have a small seive that sifts out at 85%. I use that when I want 'white' flour.

You cannot apply proth5's approach to get high extraction flour because impact / micronizer mills are not designed to re-mill flour. Attempting this can damage your mill. Micronizer mills only accept whole grain and therefore only produce 100% whole grain flour. All you can do is pick a fine setting, mill the grain and hope for the best.

You could try buying a very fine seive for the resulting flour but I'm not sure any bran particles would be sufficiently large to sift out. When I mill hard wheat with my Nutrimill on a fine setting, the resulting flour feels only faintly sandy - the bran is very very fine and pretty well incorporated into the flour.

For the kinds of breads you mention, I would suggest using hard white spring wheat (Prarie Gold) rather than hard red spring wheat (Bronze Chief) for a taste that will be closer to commercial bread flour.

I would also suggest starting with a mix of home-milled and commercial bread flours, rather than simply substituting home-milled for commercial. To be safe, you might start with 30% home-milled and see how it performs. Master the bread at that percentage and gradually increase the percent of home-milled in subsequent bakings of the same recipe.

Home-milled whole wheat flour does perform differently from commercial whole wheat flour or bread flour. There will be a learning curve, which is why I suggest a gradual approach.

Best of luck with your mill.

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PS  If you want to create a wheat flour that is weaker (eg - less protein, lower gluten) you could try mixing flour milled from hard wheat and soft wheat. (Used alone, soft wheat produces a flour that is not suitable for bread, as it does not develop gluten). I would strongly suggest, however, sticking with what you have and trying it first.

Hi

I have never used a starter for bread. I don't like sour dough (or it could be I might like it homemade, I've tried some at the health feed co-op and still don't like it) and it seems that it is for sour dough bread.

Does a starter make bread taste like sour dough bread or is it just another way to make bread?

Once it's made, do you just keep it alive - do you have to use it by a certain time, how do you store it (you know, all the basic questions)?

Thanks

Nancy

LOL... I did an experiment yesterday just to see if it was possible to sift my home ground wheat for white flour.  The end result is that I have very high respect for whatever methods the commercial millers use. I don't think it's possible to make white flour at home. I found some loosely woven linen cloth in my fabric stash so I made a "sifter" from it.

Conclusion:  Way too  much work and not good results. What I got was some very fine pale tan flour--about half the volume I started with-- and the same amount or a bit more of the bran and germ.

I will stick to grinding my wheat extra finely for my whole wheat baking because that's how I like it. I would not attempt to grind it coarsely just to be able to sift out the bran and my mill recommends against milling it a second time. 

I am happy to be able to buy good white flour, but I will still make my whole wheat breads with my home ground flour.

afjagsp123, What is WMBC flour?

Catherine

I feel pretty dumb now. I used to get that Bronze Chief wheat until I recently switched to their Prairie Gold. Thanks for clueing me in on the acronym. 

Catherine