Making Flour With My Cheapo Grinder

When I wrote the original review of my cheap grinder I said that it's not capable of making flour that's suitable for bread making. Then when I was brewing a batch of beer the other day I noticed something after I cracked my grain. There was dust everywhere. It's pretty obvious what that dust was.....flour! Obviously I knew that it technically could make flour when I made that statement but I just assumed that it would take way too much time and effort. So I decided to see how much time and effort it would take to make enough flour to bake some bread. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Here's how I did it.

The grain hopper on my grinder is pretty big. It holds about 3 cups of whole wheat so that's what I started with. As I ran the grain through the handle was fairly easy to turn and didn't take too much effort. I'm not in great shape and, after a full hopper, I was feeling the burn but it didn't tire me out. From what I hear about the more expensive grinders the handle can be really hard to turn and it gets tiring fast. This was easy enough that a kid could probably do it.



After the first run I tried to sift the cracked grain with my flour sifter. It didn't work very well. The sifter jammed up and the pieces it was letting through were too big. I ended up using the grain bag that I use to sparge my grain while homebrewing. It's basically just a long, skinny bag made out of very fine netting. Anything like that should work. I put a cup of the cracked grain in the bag at a time, grabbed both ends and then sifted it back and forth over a mixing bowl until dust stopped falling out. After sifting I put the cracked grain in another container to be run through the grinder again. When I ran the cracked grain through I mixed in a cup or so of more wheat berries. Wheat berries are really hard. As they rub up against each other between the grinder plates they contribute just as much to the pulverizing into flour as the grinding together of the plates themselves. Here's what I ended up with after just a few runs. It turned out finer than corn meal but a little bit more coarse than store bought whole wheat flour. My flour is on the left. The store bought flour is on the right. The cracked grain that I was left with is on the bottom. I did a couple more runs after I took this pic. The whole process took about thirty minutes.



I was making sourdough so I cheated a bit and used unbleached white flour to make my sponge. I also ended up needing a bit more flour so I went ahead and used about a cup or so of store bought whole wheat flour. I also threw in a cup of chopped craisins and used honey instead of sugar. The recipe ended up looking something like this:

my starter (originally just 1 cup unbleached white flour and 1 cup water)
1 cup unbleached flour
1 cup store bought whole wheat flour
4 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour
1 cup craisins
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp honey

I mixed everything up then kneaded the dough. Then I let it rest for half an hour or so. I punched it down, rolled it out, made two loaves out of it and let it rise for several hours. After it was done rising I brushed an egg/milk mixture over it and then sprinkled on some of the leftover cracked grains.



The finished product turned out pretty well. It didn't rise as much as I'd have liked it to but it was sufficient. It turned out a little heavy and nutty but extremely tasty. The first loaf was gone in a couple of hours. The second one will probably be gone tonight. With a little effort this grinder is definitely sufficient for making bread flour. I'd certainly prefer something that's higher quality but it makes a pretty good backup. Where there's a will there's a way and when you don't have the proper tools you improvise.