I am loving my birthday gift, a Wonder Mill grain grinder. Because of the need to soak grains and flour in order to neutralize their phytic acid, I have done little baking in recent years. It was just too much work to soak flour in yoghurt when I wanted to bake bread or pancakes. I began experimenting with buckwheat flour last spring and was encouraged. Buckwheat is low in phytic acid, so there is less need to soak the stuff. That meant that I could make short breads–pancakes, muffins, etc–without all the soaking headache. However, buckwheat flour has a very distinct and bitter taste, which put a damper on certain baked goods, so I still hoped for a better option.
And, now, I have the grain mill. And, it’s fabulous. I can buy whole grain and soak it for 8 hours, thereby neutralizing all nefarious phytic acid, then dry my soaked grains, then mill them.
I always imagined that wheat flour products were necessarily heavy and heavy. Not so. My whole wheat pancakes are super-light and have a wonderful nutty flavor. And, the buckwheat flour that I mill is not bitter, but light and, pardon the redundancy, somewhat nutty.
I have also just purchased whole oats (not the rolled or steel cut kind) and am trying to figure out what to make with oat flour; oats are very high in phytic acid, so I had actually stopped making granola, but, now that I can soak my oats, I’m going to try again. (Why didn’t I just soak my rolled oats, you ask? Try soaking rolled oats and see the gloopy mess that results).
One glitch I’ve encountered is making whole-wheat bread. The flour that my Wonder Mill grinds seems to be a bit more coarse than commercial flour, which is great for making fluffy pancakes. But, my bread dough has the consistency of cookie dough and turns out very dense. I tried setting my mill on the “pastry flour” setting today and will see how this next batch of wheat bread turns out. Any ideas, you flour-milling readers?
For some reason, whenever I think of a grain mill I imagine of one of those giant waterwheel-powered mills from centuries ago. I suppose it is no surprise that I grew up in the suburbs!
This sounds delicious, though. Do you have an allergy to phytic acid or is there something undesirable about it that we should be aware of? Pardon my ignorance.
No ignorace in need of pardon. I never knew about phytic acid either until I began using the Nourishing Traditions cookbook: http://www.amazon.com/Nourishing-Traditions-Challenges-Politically-Dictocrats/dp/0967089735.
Phytic acid is not good for anybody, except seeds of course. It acts as a “lock” in all seeds, preserving their nutrient content in stasis until the seed sprouts, at which time phytic acid is neutralized. That’s good for the seed but bad for our tummies because it makes our bodies work much harder to unlock the nutrients in grains; in addition, it causes stomach irritation and poor absorption of the grain. Things like Irritable Bowel Syndrome and so forth can result.
Ruminant animals (cows, etc) have multiple stomachs so the grains they eat can ferment in their stomachs, thereby neutralizing the phytic acid. But, because we only have one stomach a piece, it’s good to aid our digestive systems by soaking grains before we eat them.
Good news about my bread from yesterday. Because I milled the wheat on “pastry” rather than “bread” setting, the flour was much more fine and the bread turned out better. More fluffy and chewy, rather than heavy and doughy.
I also really like this bread recipe for doing all whole wheat bread: http://articles.urbanhomemaker.com/index.php?article=83
Hmm… I never knew that. I will have to check out that cookbook.
What do you do to keep your bread fresh? About six months ago, I was on a kick where I was making homemade bread quite a bit. It tasted fantastic the day it was made but by the second day it was noticeably less fresh. By the third day it was basically uneatable.
Given that I’m just cooking for myself (and my girlfriend when she comes over to visit) I found that I wasn’t able to use up all the bread before it became stale. While I am wary of the preservatives in store-bought bread, it seems like I waste a lot less food when I use that instead.
Do you ever have this problem?