Air: Baking’s Key Variable - Gluten (part 3) - Mill Your Own Flour

Bread—No-Knead Method

Mix everything until the flour is completely moistened. This should take only about 30 seconds. Cover and let rest at room temperature for 20 hours.

Place a medium-sized cast iron pot in your oven and preheat both to 450°F / 230°C. While the oven is heating, transfer the dough onto a floured surface and fold three or four times. Leave for 15 minutes. Shape rapidly into a boule—a round loaf—and place on a generously floured cloth towel. Proof until doubled in size. Dump into the preheated cast iron pot and bake with the lid on for 30 minutes. Take the lid off and bake until the crust has a dark golden color, about 15 minutes.

Mill Your Own Flour

Milling flour is a lot easier than you might imagine: snag some wheat berries—which are just hulled wheat kernels, with bran, germ, and endosperm still intact—from your local health food store or co-op, run them through a mill, and you’ve got fresh flour.

Why bother? Well, for one, the taste is fresher; volatile compounds in the wheat won’t have had time to break down. Then there are the health aspects. Most commercial whole wheat flours have to heat-process the germ to prevent it from going rancid, but this heat-processing also affects some of the fats in the flour.

On the downside, freshly milled flour won’t develop gluten as well as aged flour. For a rustic loaf of bread, this is probably fine, but it’s not so good if you’re trying to make whole wheat pasta, in which the gluten helps hold the pasta together. Of course, you can always add in some gluten flour to boost the gluten levels back up.

You have a couple of options for mills. KitchenAid makes a mill attachment for its mixers. If you do spring for a KitchenAid attachment, though, be warned that it can put quite a strain on the mixer. Set it to low speed and run your grain through in two passes, doing a first pass to a coarse grind before doing a fine grind. Alternatively, take a look at K-Tec’s Kitchen Mill, which is in roughly the same price range but is designed specifically for the task.

You can run other grains, such as rice and barley, through a mill as well. Too-moist grains and higher-fat items such as almonds or cocoa nibs are a no-go, though: they’ll gum up the grinder.

Wheat berries.

First pass: coarse grind.

Second pass: fine grind.

P.S. Don’t expect to be able to mill things like cake flour. Cake flour is bleached with chlorine gas to mature it. Maturing—the process by which flour is aged—would eventually happen naturally due to oxidation, but chlorine treatment speeds it up. It also modifies the starch in the flour so that it can absorb more water during gelatinization  and weakens the proteins in the flour, reducing the amount of gluten that can be formed. Additionally, chlorination lowers the temperature of gelatinization, so batters that include solids—nuts, fruits, chocolate chips—perform better because there’s less time for the solids to sink before the starches are able to gel up around them.