Adventures in wheat

Realizing that I am probably the only one interested in this, I'm still going to post about it because, well, I think it's interesting. So here it goes...

In an attempt to work on our food storage and emergency preparedness, we decided to purchase a wheat grinder. When we were married, we inherited a bunch of wheat--for which we were very grateful, but had no way to actually use it. As newlywed college students, we had little desire (or time) to be grinding wheat and making our own bread. Since then, our boxes of wheat cans have served a very important purpose: holding up our bed. It seems that recently there has been a real push for emergency preparedness (I know there always has been, but it feels like it is getting increasingly more important) so we are in a process to get our family better prepared.

I know there are many ways of going about food storage and every family's needs are a little different. One principle I do want to follow is the "Store what you eat--Eat what you store" rule. I figured if we ever HAD to use our wheat, we would be in real trouble, since we didn't have any way to grind it. And besides that, we haven't ever made anything with it before. After searching for the best grinding solution I decided to get two grinders--One hand crank mill (can be used without electricity) and a grain mill attachment for my beloved mixer. The cost of these two ended up being less than an electric mill and served a dual purpose.

Now comes the experiment!

First we used the hand crank mill to grind enough flour to make one loaf of bread. This takes a considerable amount of time, but I figure that if we are in a situation where we need to actually use this, we will have nothing better to do anyway, right? I was actually a little surprised at how fine we were able to get the flour with a little hand mill. We sifted the larger pieces out and put them through the mill again which helped a little, but to make any difference you have to do this process quite a few times. I made one loaf of bread with this flour, kneading by hand. The result was pleasantly surprising and rated "pretty good" by Allison. I was expecting a brick to come out of the oven, but it was actually quite edible.

Our hand mill is called the "Back to Basics Grain Mill" and we bought it for about $45 on eBay.

Next, I used the KitchenAid grain mill attachment to grind enough flour for two loaves. This process was not only faster but much less tiring :) The flour was noticeably finer, but not quite as fine as commercially ground whole wheat flour. I mixed the dough in the mixer. The result was very similar to the first loaf. In fact, there was not much difference at all between the two, which surprised me a little.

Last, I made two more loaves of whole wheat bread using commercially ground flour. I mixed the dough in the mixer. The bread here did seem a bit softer, rose slightly more, and was oh-so-good. I am not sure if I was just hungry, but I ate close to half a loaf of it when it came out of the oven (slathered with butter, of course)!

I had never made whole wheat bread before--just half and half mixtures with white flour. I was a little surprised how different it was to work with the dough. Now I just need to experiment with different recipes and get used to working with it. Anybody have a great (simple) recipe for whole wheat bread?

Of course, if we start using our wheat supply we will need to rotate some more in--otherwise, how will we keep our bed up??