I Started Milling My Own Flour to Make Bread. Here’s What Happened
Spoiler: Things got out of hand pretty quickly!
For years, I’ve had a slightly uneasy relationship with bread. I love the stuff. Bread, unfortunately, has never shown quite the same affection towards me.
I’ve had digestive problems for most of my life, and wheat has long been on my list of suspects. I’m not coeliac, as far as I know, and I’ve never had a medical reason to avoid gluten. But there seemed to be enough of an association between eating wheat-based foods and feeling lousy afterwards that I became suspicious of it.
I don’t think I’m particularly unusual in that. Plenty of people decide that bread doesn’t agree with them and eventually arrive at gluten as the explanation. Sometimes they’re absolutely right. But I began wondering whether I’d made the same assumption without ever really knowing what the culprit was.
Was it gluten? Wheat itself? The sheer amount of carbohydrate? Something about commercially produced bread? Or was my digestive system simply an unreasonable little bastard that enjoyed keeping me guessing?
Then I discovered freshly milled flour.
What if wheat wasn’t actually the problem?
I started watching YouTube videos about people who buy whole grains, grind them into flour at home and use that flour to make their own bread, and before long, I’d disappeared down a rabbit hole.
What really caught my attention wasn’t the milling itself. It was the enthusiasm of the people doing it. They raved about freshly milled flour. People talked about feeling enormously better after making the switch, about the nutritional benefits of eating the whole grain, and about discovering a completely different relationship with bread. Some even described being able to enjoy bread again after previously believing that wheat simply didn’t agree with them.
Bread could be back on the menu! That certainly got my attention.
There was also a lot of talk about nutrition. Milling the whole grain means keeping all its parts together, and because it isn’t milled until you’re ready to use it, advocates argue that you’re getting it at its freshest and most nutritious.
Exactly how much of what I was hearing was established science, personal experience or good old-fashioned internet enthusiasm, I didn’t know. But after years of suspecting that wheat and I simply didn’t get along, I was intrigued.
What if I’d been blaming the wrong thing?
Perhaps the only way to find out was to go right back to the grain itself, mill it fresh, make some bread and see what happened.
So I decided to buy a little grain and an inexpensive mill and conduct a small experiment.
That was the plan, anyway.
But within a couple of days, my modest little experiment had begun getting rather out of hand.
Enter the Grain Mill From Hell
I decided to be sensible. Rather than spending a fortune, I bought a cheap grain mill for about £70 and a relatively small quantity of whole wheat grain. I already owned a bread-making machine, so this seemed like a perfectly reasonable experiment. It would be the last financially sensible decision I made for a while.
The grain mill worked. Unfortunately, I suspect it could also be heard from France.
I joked to a friend that the local air traffic control had phoned and asked whether I wouldn’t mind keeping the noise down because they were having trouble hearing their jets approaching. This thing made your ears bleed.
It also produced flour that was a little more gravelly than I had imagined. But it worked. I milled the wheat, followed a basic whole-grain recipe, put everything into the bread machine and made my first loaf.
No question about it. It was fantastic.
Not “quite nice for homemade wholemeal bread.” I mean, fantastic!
The flavour was completely different from the bread I was accustomed to buying from a supermarket. It was rich, satisfying and ridiculously delicious.
Looking back, that first loaf was probably the moment the rabbit hole opened beneath my feet.
Apparently I Own a Bakery Now
This is where “I’ve found it, this is my life now” Rick took over.
The £70 experimental flour mill suddenly wasn’t good enough. After watching yet more videos on the subject, my enthusiasm convinced me that upgrading was the only sensible thing to do, so I ended up ordering a higher-quality German-built grain mill, while my long-suffering bank account let out a weary, knowing sigh at the £300-plus bill and braced for the inevitable additional incoming costs.
Then came more grain. Quite a lot more grain, as it turned out.
In America, I’ve noticed wheat is often sold with wonderfully specific descriptions such as hard red, soft white and so forth. Here in Britain, you’re lucky if the bag tells you anything beyond “wheat.”
So I researched. I found an online organic whole-food supplier and started ordering different grains. Wheat. Spelt. Einkorn. Emmer. Rye. Then organic honey. Organic yeast. Books. A new bread machine with twin paddles and a larger capacity.
Then came an assortment of those rather attractive glass jars with metal clamps and rubber seals. Obviously the kitchen cupboards needed reorganising. Shelves were adjusted. Ingredients were transferred into jars. At some point during all of this I looked around and realised my little bread experiment appeared to have developed its own infrastructure.
Then my slight prepper mentality joined the party.
I’d been hearing that intact grains can store almost indefinitely in the right conditions, and considerably longer than flour. If I was going to keep wheat anyway, I reasoned, why not keep a good supply?
So back online I went. More grain. Mylar bags. Oxygen absorbers. Food-grade storage buckets.
At this point, my simple bread-making experiment was beginning to look suspiciously like preparation for the collapse of civilisation.
I was also hundreds of pounds poorer, but I couldn’t have been happier.
Because I thought I’d cracked it.
For a While, It Looked as Though I Had
I decided to give the experiment a month. I’d heard plenty of people say there would likely be an “adjustment period”. Suddenly eating large amounts of whole grain and fibre could change what was happening in my gut, so I wasn’t going to panic over every gurgle.
And during those first few days something rather wonderful happened.
I felt good.
My energy increased. The brain fog I’d been experiencing seemed to lift. I had more enthusiasm and generally felt as though there was a bit more life in me. Even my digestion initially appeared to be moving in the right direction.
Most encouragingly, I wasn’t experiencing anything like the digestive reaction I’d come to expect from supermarket bread. There was a little bloating, but nothing remotely comparable. My stomach did make some extraordinary noises when I was lying in bed, but I interpreted that as part of the adjustment.
My gut was adapting. Things seemed to be changing.
Meanwhile I kept baking. I experimented with different grain combinations. Small amounts of ancient grains added wonderful flavours. I gave loaves to friends and neighbours because I wanted the practice and couldn’t possibly eat everything I wanted to bake. The feedback was excellent. People loved it.
Then I made a fruit loaf, containing mixed fruit, sultanas, citrus peel, glacé cherries and crystallised ginger.
It was magnificent!
Possibly a little too magnificent.
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Freshly milled bread is extremely moreish when you discover how to make it properly. I started to realise that my new healthy food had one serious design flaw.
I absolutely loved eating it and it was becoming increasingly difficult not to eat the bloody stuff.
My Digestive System Had Other Ideas
After the first week, I began wondering when the “adjustment period” was supposed to end. The mild bloating hadn’t disappeared. In fact, it was getting a bit worse. My digestion hadn’t settled down either.
My newly discovered holy grail was beginning to look a bit less holy and more holey.
I still wasn’t ready to abandon the experiment. Perhaps I was eating too much. I tried reducing the bread. That wasn’t particularly easy because it tasted so bloody good, but I tried. It didn’t seem to make a lot of difference.
Week two became week three. Nothing improved. The bloating began interfering with my sleep because I was uncomfortable in bed. The digestive problems continued and showed no signs of reducing, not even slightly.
And meanwhile, something else was happening.
The numbers on my bathroom scales were heading north at a slightly alarming rate.
Five Pounds in the Wrong Direction
I had deliberately tried to get away from obsessing about weight during this experiment. The entire philosophy was supposed to be about nourishment. Eat highly nutritious whole foods. Give the body what it needs. Let the weight sort itself out afterwards.
At least that was what I kept telling myself.
After three full weeks, I was around five pounds heavier than when I’d started.
When you’ve spent most of your life overweight and you’re actively trying to move in the opposite direction, five pounds upwards isn’t particularly encouraging. Apparently the bathroom scales hadn’t received the memo about nourishment.
On top of that, the generalised feeling of inflammation I associate with eating more carbohydrates hadn’t improved either. Nor was there any sign that it was going to.
Oddly, some of the good things still remained. My energy was still pretty good. My head still felt clearer. One of those little urine health-testing strips even seemed reasonably pleased with me.
Nutritionally, I appeared to be doing rather well. My digestive system, however, was still filing formal complaints.
At the end of the third week I finally had to admit something I didn’t particularly want to admit.
This didn’t appear to be working for me.
The Most Annoying Part Is That I Still Love the Bread
Ordinary bread from the supermarket has caused me problems for years. Bread from freshly milled flour seemed considerably easier on me initially, but as the weeks passed, those all-too-familiar digestive problems returned. I even tried making a loaf from spelt grain, which I’d heard some people found easier to tolerate. My body still wasn’t particularly enthusiastic.
After three full weeks, I stopped.
I expected that to provide a fairly straightforward answer. If the bread really was causing the problem, presumably things would begin settling down once I stopped eating it.
Except more than a week later, things still haven’t completely returned to normal.
Which is bloody inconvenient from a storytelling perspective.
I’d been hoping for a nice tidy conclusion. Eat wheat, feel bad. Stop wheat, feel better. Case closed.
Unfortunately, my digestive system apparently hadn’t read the article.
Maybe the bread contributed. Maybe suddenly eating so much whole grain and fibre played a part. Maybe something else was going on at the same time.
I simply don’t know.
Three weeks of experimentation, several hundred pounds spent on equipment and enough grain to feed a small medieval village, and my definitive conclusion is:
Dunno.
Another Holy Grail That Wasn’t Mine
Was I disappointed? Of course.
There was definitely a moment of: “Here we bloody go again.”
For a little while, I genuinely thought I’d found my holy grail. Here was a food I adored eating. I could make it myself. I knew exactly what went into it. Whole grains are highly nutritious foods, the bread tasted extraordinary, and I was hearing story after story from people with problems similar to mine who felt transformed after making it part of their diet.
I wanted to be one of them. Apparently I’m not.
But I don’t regret trying it.
If I’ve learned anything from roughly forty years of experimenting with food, it’s that there doesn’t appear to be one perfect diet that works for everybody.
That’s where I think dietary communities sometimes lose their way. Something changes a person’s life and naturally they become evangelical about it. “This worked for me” gradually becomes “This is how human beings are supposed to eat.”
Except another person has gone carnivore and says exactly the same thing. Someone else becomes vegan. Someone discovers keto. Someone else swears by paleo. Another person starts milling wheat in their kitchen and can’t remember ever feeling better.
They can’t all be the one true diet that humans are supposed to eat. But perhaps there isn’t one. Perhaps different people simply thrive on different things.
Perhaps that’s the lesson I’ve been painfully slow to learn.
My job isn’t to discover the perfect human diet.
It’s to discover mine.
Would I Recommend Freshly Milled Flour?
Absolutely. Unquestionably.
Which probably isn’t the conclusion you were expecting.
If you enjoy bread and you’re curious about milling your own grain, I think it’s a fascinating thing to try. Bread made from freshly milled whole-grain flour is some of the best I’ve ever tasted. Mix in a little einkorn, emmer, rye, or another ancient grain and the flavour becomes sublime.
And that fruit loaf? I’m still going to make it. Not for myself every day, perhaps, but certainly for friends, neighbours and the occasional treat.
I also still have a very expensive German grain mill, a twin-paddle bread machine and enough stored wheat to see me through a minor apocalypse, so it would seem wasteful not to.
For now, freshly milled bread joins the rather long list of things I’ve tried while attempting to figure myself out. It wasn’t the answer I hoped it would be. But I’m glad I tried it.
And I’m definitely going to miss that bread.
