Small, easy to use, high quality hand grain mills such as the Country Living Grain Mill or the Family Grain Mill make it easy to grind your own fresh flour from whole wheat, ensuring the highest possible vitamin content for the whole wheat flour in your home baking and cooking!
Benefits of Using a Hand Grain Mill
Freshly ground wheat flour has a high vitamin content; vitamins that degrade all too quickly when exposed to the air. The whole grain flour that we buy from stores is often quite stale and may have significantly reduced vitamin content when compared to freshly ground.
Grinding wheat is very educational for children, helping them to understand the origins of their food. Why not go a step further by planting a few of your wheat grains with your kids; you can then add your little harvest to the wheat that you grind for your bread! And then try making your own sourdough starter in order to bake home made sourdough bread without store-bought yeast.
Turning the handle of a hand grain mill is also very good exercise, an excellent way of truly earning your daily bread. You also enjoys the satisfaction of becoming more self reliant as grinding your own flour is a significant step towards self sufficiency.
Which Hand Grain Mill to choose?
There are many grain mills on the market, in making your choice consider these factors before buying:
- How many people are you baking and cooking for?
- Are you planning to use your grain mill regularly, or is it just for emergency use?
- Are you prepared to pay for a more robust construction for your grain mill?
Some Suggestions:
- The Country Living Grain Mill is a reliable, tried and trusted, hand grain mill for regular use. However it is one of the more expensive mills.
- Family Grain Mill is suitable for occasional use and is cheaper. which may suit you better.
Choose your wheat variety for your Hand Grain Mill.
To make good bread and home made fresh pasta you will need a wheat variety with a high gluten content, known as hard wheat. In North America, much of the wheat grown is hard wheat, but do check with your wheat supplier that you are indeed buying hard wheat suitable for bread and pasta making. In northern Europe much of the wheat grown is not hard wheat, but traditional bread wheat varieties, such as Maris Widgeon, will grow, however you may need to search around for a supplier.
Take care to ensure that the wheat is of the highest quality, in particular that the wheat is not infected with ergot, a rare but highly poisonous parasite of wheat grains. Ergot is however rare in modern wheat crops as stringent measures are in place to avoid ergot infection in cereals.
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