Mal dit eget mel

Grind your own flour

I was recently lucky enough to be able to borrow a Mockmill from a business partner. Mockmill is a grinder or mill for grinding flour at home. The principle is immediately the same as with a large commercial stone grinder, it is just easier to operate and on a much smaller scale, so that it can stand at home on the kitchen table.

Wholemeal flour is best when freshly ground, I always grind my flour immediately before use. This is where the taste is best and the grain's nutrients are best preserved. It is also in freshly ground flour that the enzyme activity is greatest, and this means that extra attention is required when baking with freshly ground flour. Dough made from freshly ground flour develops and rises faster than flour that has been standing for a longer time, so it can be advantageous to reduce the amount of sourdough by 25%-50% of what you would otherwise use, and possibly also lower the temperature of the water by a few degrees.

When grinding larger quantities of grain, it is important to pay attention to the heat generation in the stones. If the stones and thus the flour get too hot, it is destroyed. Heat generation is only a challenge when grinding large quantities of flour and especially when it is ground very finely. To reduce heat generation, I paint larger amounts twice, first on a rough setting and then on the setting I want.

I do not sift the flour from my grinder, at most I sift a very small amount of shell parts that the stone does not catch, it is less than 0.5 grams per 100 grams of flour, so it hardly counts. Sifting your own flour is a big waste, in ordinary sifted wheat flour there is approx. 28% of the grain is sorted from, and the biggest gain from freshly ground flour lies in whole grain flour.

I like to explore "exotic" grains such as einkorn, emmer, kamut and spelt. Grains that I bake with mainly for their taste rather than their baking properties and therefore use as wholemeal flour. It can be a long time before I use a kilo of these types of flour, and a bag can therefore last a long time before it is used up. Whole grains can last a long time if they are stored dry and fairly cool, so with a grinder on the kitchen counter, I always have freshly ground whole grain flour and don't have to worry about the shelf life of my whole grain flour.

In addition to several different types of wheat and rye, I have so far painted

Oats and barley completely coarse. I soak it for 10-12 hours and cook porridge for baking and to eat for breakfast, for example.

Rice flour - perfect for the rising baskets and for sprinkling the bottom of the loaves with before they smoke in the oven. I grind rice on the finest setting.

Coarse salt - I often find it difficult to find fine salt of good quality, and the coarse salt can be difficult to dissolve in the dough. The Mockmill grinds sea salt just the way I want it. I grind salt on medium coarseness.

Mikael Krogdal February 2021

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