Your Nose to the Grindstone

Opening up the back door of your home to the smell of fresh baked bread is one of those simple pleasures of life that will put a big grin on your face.  It is soothing, relaxing, and invokes an involuntary reflex that directs you to immediately rush to where the bread knife and butter are located.  Not margarine.  Butter.  Real Butter.

Image Credit

If you want to do it right, there's some work, though, before you find yourself liberally spreading real butter on top of a fresh, warm piece of bread that you've just sliced from a fresh baked loaf.  And if you really want to do it right, then it involves a little more work, but it's worth it.  Let's check it out.

First, I want to talk about an excellent documentary we watched on PBS the other night.  You can watch it online by clicking Here.  You can also read the entire transcript by clicking HERE.  It is called In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan.  We enjoyed it immensely.  In the documentary he said that the bread that our ancestors ate was much different from the white bread we eat.  It was whole grain.  The flour was made by grinding wheat between stones. The resulting flour contained the whole grain - the bran, the germ.  There was a downside to this, though - the bread was heavy and chewy.  White bread, made by removing the bran and germ made a lighter bread, but only the rich could afford it.  White bread also had a long shelf life as the germ, which was removed, is the part that goes bad quickly.

Then a new technology called the roller mill came out where you could easily separate the bran and the germ and feed that stuff to the cattle.  Except "that stuff" is the good stuff.  The stuff that makes you healthy.  The bran and germ are loaded with nutrients and vitamins.  The white flour is mainly carbohydrates that the body breaks down into sugars.  We love that, but eating white bread is horrible for you, as most of the nutrients and vitamins were robbed.

Once people began eating mostly white bread, it began to take its toll on people's health.  They began to get sick and suffer from diseases that were heretofore rare. Then it was discovered that these sickly people had a nutrient deficiency caused by removing the 'good stuff' out of the bread!  Well, what do you think the food industry did?  Yep, they began enriching flour with the very nutrients and vitamins that were removed.  Crazy, isn't it?  They began trying to solve the problem that their high tech solution caused by using more high tech solutions.

So, back to the daily grind for our daily bread.  We're low tech rednecks.  We have sought to make white bread extinct in our home.  Here's how we do it:  First, five or so years ago we purchased a Victorio Hand Operated Grain Mill.  We're actually on our second one as we wore the first one out. We like this appliance!  We purchase wheat berries in bulk in 25 pound sacks from Azure Standard Co-op and use two different types of wheat:

• Spelt: an ancient grain mentioned in the Bible.  It is a soft wheat and easy to grind.
• Kamut: also an ancient grain.  It is a hard wheat and harder to grind, but has a nice, nutty flavor and more protein.

Tricia normally mixes 1/2 spelt flour with 1/2 kamut flour to make homemade bread.

Grinding the daily bread

We always keep the hopper full of wheat berries and it beckons you to crank and make flour as you stroll through the kitchen.  We've found out (plagiarizing from Tom Sawyer) that if you keep it full, when guests and neighbor kids come to visit, their curiosity is piqued and they'll grind some of the flour for us.  That is shameful conduct on our part, is it not?!

Give it a spin!

Here is an up close look at Spelt grains.  You can see that it has the bran (all nutrients) remaining.

Spelt

For those (like me) that like immediate gratification, you can see the results of your labors coming out of the bottom of the grain mill as you crank.  It builds in big mounds and every so often you have to shake down the cone.

Flour Power!

We have separate storage containers for our spelt flour and our kamut flour since we use each for different baking purposes.  When we fill up the container, we'll dump it into the bulk storage container.

Whole wheat flour

You're probably thinking, "Doesn't that take a long time?"  Not really.  You'd be surprised.  Last night I timed myself.  At a leisurely pace I started cranking and turned off the timer when I had one heaping cup of ground spelt flour.  It only took me 1 minute and 22 seconds to grind a cup of flour! Of course, as fatigue sets in, your second cup will take a little longer, but when you get tired, you enlist help!  It really doesn't take much time at all.  And, with all the calories you burned cranking your wheat into flour, you can well afford to eat a couple more slices of fresh, warm bread when it comes out of the oven and slather butter on top that quickly melts into the bread!!

Flour falling out of the mill

The fresh loaves don't last long around our house.  I wanted to take a nice picture of a freshly baked loaf of bread, but the loaf was already partially devoured.

Our Daily Bread

But that's okay, it'll only be a few minutes until we (or guests that come to visit) have more freshly ground flour from which to bake more loaves of bread.  Victorio actually sells an electric motor attachment that you can attach to the mill if you take the handle off, but for the time being, we're just fine grinding it with man or woman-power.

I can remember as a child reading a Little Golden Book story about "The Little Red Hen."  Do you remember that old folk tale?  It is about a hen that finds some wheat and asked all the barnyard animals to help, but no one will.  She harvests it, threshes it, mills it into flour, and bakes the flour into bread.  No one will help her. BUT, when it is time to eat, well, they all want to eat.  The little red hen declines their offers to help her eat the bread, telling them, "No one would help be prepare it, so one one should help me eat it."  The little red hen and her chicks ate it all.  The moral to the story is that if you want to share in the enjoyment of a product, you should contribute something to making it. Certainly wise words from the little red hen!