How to freshly mill flour at home for baking | The Perfect Loaf

Baking with freshly milled flour has been a part of my sourdough bread-making for almost as long as I’ve been a baker. Fresh flour—whether from a heritage grain, ancient grain, or modern grain—brings a wallop of fantastic flavor, aroma, and color to any bread. With modern countertop electric mills available to home bakers, milling flour takes just minutes in the morning before you begin mixing.

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At a high level, these are the reasons that I love baking with freshly milled flour:

• Increased flavor, aroma, and color
• Increased nutrition
• Convenience (you can keep berries indefinitely and then mill them when needed, whereas flour lasts 6 to 12 months)
• Economical (whole berries are typically cheaper than flour)

In this guide on how to freshly mill flour at home for baking, we’ll first explain milling, then discuss each step of milling your own flour, and finally, provide practical advice for working with it.

What is Freshly Milled Flour?

Freshly milled, or freshly ground, flour is a grain that has recently been milled. Every baker and miller has a different definition for what they consider fresh flour (sometimes called “green flour”), but for me, it’s flour that’s milled either the day I’m using it or the day before. To me, it’s just as convenient for me to mill all the flour I need for the day’s bread first thing in the morning or the night before if the levain calls for fresh flour, so there’s no need for me to mill a large quantity and keep it stored in the pantry. 

The milling process is when grain berries are ground between burrs, stones (for stone-milled flour), or rollers into a powder, and the result is flour. A grain berry is composed of a protective outer layer called the bran; starches, gluten proteins, and arabinoxylans contained in the endosperm; and the germ, which is what would sprout into a new plant (given the right environment). During milling, some of the starch granules are damaged, allowing for better water absorption and increased fermentation activity and ultimately facilitating the creation of a viscoelastic dough for bread making.

The professional miller, or someone with the appropriate equipment, can measure and control the amount of starch damage incurred when milling (related to the genetics of the grain, protein content, and the grinding action of the mill). Consistent starch damage ultimately leads to consistent water absorption and fermentation that’s not too active yet not too sluggish (the more starch damaged, the more sugars are available for fermentation by yeasts and bacteria, and the faster fermentation proceeds). For the home miller, the goal is to mill as fine as possible to ensure sufficient (although maybe not optimal, if there is such a designation) starch damage for active fermentation and appropriate dough consistency.

What Are The Benefits of Freshly Milled Flour?

I find freshly milled flour to have an enriched aroma and an amplified taste, adding a desirable color to bread’s crust and crumbs. It’s hard to quantify, but the aroma is intense, and depending on the grain, it can be a little grassy, nutty, and with notes of cream. The flavor is nutty, sweet, and rich, and depending on the variety, it can be extremely vivid and forward (Red Fife is a good example).

I like to equate freshly milling your flour to freshly grinding coffee beans before making a cup; you unlock another flavor, freshness, and aroma inherent in the food, but hard to describe without trying it for yourself.

Is Freshly Milled Flour Healthy?

While it can be difficult to determine if freshly milled flour is more nutritious than aged whole wheat flour, using whole grain freshly milled flour is certainly healthy in that we’re making bread with whole grains—the entirety of the grain berry—thus bringing along all the nutrients, vitamins, fats, fiber, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and essential minerals (magnesium, selenium, and copper) our body benefits from.

Speaking of fiber and healthy ingredients, check out my whole-grain and high-fiber seeded sourdough bread for a pan loaf that’s as delicious as it is healthy.

What Are The Drawbacks of Freshly Milled Flour?

Baking with freshly milled flour requires a slightly different approach to baking bread. Typically, whole grain freshly milled flour results in a dough that’s not quite as elastic and strong as one made with aged flour. This doesn’t mean you should mix the dough less or be more delicate; it simply means you must adjust your expectations when using fresh flour. Instead of expecting a loaf with huge volume and a wildly open crumb, expect a squatter loaf with a tighter interior. But! When you might sacrifice in terms of volume, you’ll gain back (doubly?) in flavor, texture, and aroma.

Freshly-Milled vs. Store-Bought Flour

Milling fresh flour at home is very different from working in large professional milling operations. At home, flour is typically milled in a single pass. Depending on their milling method, a large miller might successively crack (or crush) the berry by increasing fineness to ensure optimal bran, germ, and endosperm separation. They want such separation to produce types of flour by holding back or including bran and germ for whiter or darker flour, respectively.

Additionally, store-bought flour is typically aged for several weeks or more between milling and selling. Aging (also called maturing) flour gives it time to oxidize, which can help result in a stronger, more elastic dough. But, using flour shortly after milling doesn’t always result in a loaf with a lack of volume, desirable texture, or increased flavor—in my experience, it’s just the opposite (more on this in a moment).

Should I Sift Freshly Milled Flour?

Sifting is using a screen (like a fine-mesh sieve from the kitchen) to remove some portion of the bran and germ from the flour, leaving only the starchy endosperm (which mills to a finer consistency) in the flour. Depending on the fineness of the screen, more or less bran and germ will be sifted away, resulting in flour that has higher extraction (such as whole wheat flour), lower extraction (such as white flour), or somewhere in between. Essentially, the more you sift freshly milled flour, the “whiter” the flour becomes.

Many different sifting screens can be purchased online. These particular screens come in 40-mesh and 60-mesh varieties. The 60-mesh is finer than the 40 and will remove more bran and germ, resulting in whiter flour.

What is Bolted Flour?

Sometimes, when discussing freshly milled flour and sifting, you’ll hear the term “bolted flour” or “bolting” used in the same context. Bolting is the same as sifting in that you use a screen to remove some portion of the bran and germ from the flour (the amount depends on the sifting screen’s fineness).

How Do I Sift Flour?

Place your sifting screen over (or inside) a large metal bowl. Then, pour the freshly milled flour on top and shake the bowl and screen to encourage the finer bits to fall through the screen. Continue doing this until only the large bran and germ are left on top of the screen.

How Can I Make High-Extraction Flour?

You might see some recipes call for high-extraction flour, which is flour that falls somewhere between typical white flour and whole wheat flour. You can use a sifting screen (as described above) to sift out some portion of the bran and germ and use the resulting flour anywhere “high-extraction flour” is called for.

Depending on how white you want your flour, the 40- or 60-mesh screen will work well to sift well. The bran/germ pieces sifted away can top your dough after they’re shaped.

Step by Step: How to Freshly Mill Flour at Home For Baking Bread

A step-by-step to milling the finest fresh flour at home:

1. Empty the electric grain mill of berries.
2. Turn the mill on and set the grind as fine as possible until you just hear the burrs begin to touch, then quickly set the mill to one setting coarser.
3. Pour the whole-grain berries into the hopper.
4. If desired, quickly set the mill to one grind level finer.

Depending on the speed, capacity, and specifications (burr size, motor speed, etc.) of my grain mill and how much flour I’m looking to mill at one time, I might give the mill a rest halfway through milling to allow it to cool so that it doesn’t overly heat the flour. One tip for alleviating this issue somewhat is to store whole berries for milling in the freezer. The berries’ cold temperature helps offset the heat generated by the milling process. In most cases, I mill 1 to 2 kilograms of flour directly without rest.

Note: it’s best not to let the mill run excessively without any berries being milled if you hear the burrs rubbing.

See the end of this post for some recommendations on grain mills for purchase and where to buy grain berries.

How Finely Should I Mill Bread Flour?

As discussed above, starch damage that occurs during milling is essential. To consider an extreme case, imagine if a wheat berry wasn’t milled at all. The protective outer bran layer would allow little (or no) moisture into the berry, and the sugars (starches) contained therein wouldn’t be available for fermentation—they would be essentially nonexistent. Milling pulverizes the berry to make flour readily fermentable by the wild yeasts and bacteria in our sourdough starter and levain.

In addition, in my experience, milling finely produces flour with better baking characteristics: dough that’s more elastic and extensible, smoother, and has ample gas-trapping capability.

There’s also another approach to fresh milling. The grain can be milled on a fine setting but not too fine. In this way, the bran and germ parts of the berry are left more whole, and you then easily bolt or sift them out, leaving a “whiter” flour. If the mill is set to the finest setting, the bran and germ get pulverized and will be at the same granularity as the rest of the wheat berry. With the bran and germ left more whole, they can then be boiled and then reintroduced into the dough later–as I do with my whole wheat sourdough loaves–used as a topping or used in another application in the kitchen (cookies, muffins, or even cakes).

When I bake with freshly milled flour, I prefer to mill it as fine as my mill can and use all the fresh flour produced. In other words, if I’m going to mill fresh flour, I almost always skip sifting or bolting—I want the whole nutrition of the wheat berry!

How To Mill “Hard” Grain

Some grains, such as Khorasan (Kamut) or even durum,  are harder (as in, the berry is a tougher consistency) than others. When milling these berries, it may be beneficial to set the electric mill to a fine grind level, but not the finest, and mill the grain. Then, set the mill to the finest level and pass the coarsely milled grain through the mill a second time.

This two-pass milling will help reduce the heat generated by the mill (which some believe decreases nutritional content) and should result in finer flour. I also find it helpful to store hard grain in the freezer since the cold temperature will help offset any heat generated by the mill.

Cracking Grains or Cereals For Bread

Some recipes at The Perfect Loaf, like my soft honey buckwheat sandwich bread, call for grain (or cereal) to be cracked, soaked, cracked, and cooked into porridge. A home flour mill can crack grain by simply setting it to the coarsest, or near-coarsest, setting and giving your grain a pass through the mill. Chances are, your mill will also produce a lot of middlings and fines along with the larger cracked bits, and if desired, you can sift the larger pieces out, though I typically use everything that comes out of the mill. 

Making Bread With Freshly Milled Flour

How To Adjust Dough Hydration When Baking With Freshly Milled Flour

When using flour I’ve milled myself, I almost always have to increase the hydration of my recipe to achieve a dough with the same consistency as when made using aged flour (as is the case with my wheat and spelt pan loaf shown above). Whether I’m using hard wheat, soft wheat, or a different grain altogether, I find that fresh flour tends to absorb more water than aged flour.

How much more water must you add when using freshly milled flour? Unfortunately, there’s no single answer. As is always the case with flour, recipes are a good guideline, but ultimately, you must make kitchen adjustments during mixing. This is one reason I typically call for holding back some of the water when mixing (and why I often label them as Water 1 and 2). Holding back a little water initially helps you add it slowly during mixing if it looks and feels like the dough can handle the addition.

How To Mix and Strengthen Bread Dough With Freshly Milled Flour

Flour that’s been milled and left to age (the amount of time is variable)—which is the majority of flour used in baking and all of the flour you’ll find in a regular supermarket—typically results in a stronger dough, has improved mixing tolerances, greater gas-trapping ability, and ultimately, it can produce bread with more volume.

One of the driving factors behind this is oxidation (oxidization), which promotes a stronger gluten network in the dough. Freshly milled flour used shortly after milling will not be as oxidized as aged flour, and thus, it typically results in a weaker dough with reduced volume and gas-trapping capability. To help alleviate this situation, mixing for additional time can help oxidize the dough to create a more elastic dough with increased gas-trapping characteristics.

Mixing Longer With Freshly Milled Flour

It’s hard to give an exact time because so many variables can affect a dough. If using a mechanical mixer, I’ll typically mix for 2 to 3 minutes longer for my typical sourdough bread, but if hydration is very high, it may require more.

My best advice is to test, mix, and develop the dough to varying degrees while keeping everything else in the recipe as consistent as possible and measuring the outcomes. It may help when doing these tests to shoot to the extremes; for example, if you mix a freshly milled flour dough for 3 to 4 minutes, next time, try doubling that and mixing for 8 minutes, just to see the upper bound and measure the result.

When working with freshly milled flour, you can mix your dough by hand or with a mechanical stand mixer (like a KitchenAid or Famag) just the same. When mixing by hand, I prefer the highly effective slap and fold technique, but techniques such as the Rubaud method or simply folding the dough directly in the mixing bowl will all work to the same effect.

At the end of mixing, you want a cohesive, smoother, and elastic dough. It does not need to pass the “windowpane test,” especially if you plan to do stretches and folds during bulk fermentation, but it should not be falling apart or very shaggy. I would like to say it should reach a medium level of development.

Which Grain Mill Should I Buy?

There are many great grain mills available to the home bread baker. The best mill depends on your situation: how much flour do you want to mill at a time? Do you want an electric mill for convenience and speed, or do you prefer to hand-mill your flour for the finest flour possible?

Regardless of your preference, any of the following mills will serve you well—they have for me over the past decade!

Mockmill

It is a fantastic mill brand that produces wonderfully fine flour at the flip of a switch. Mockmill has several mills with different specifications to accommodate a range of outputs depending on how much flour you’re looking to produce. See Mockmill’s home flour mills.

KoMo Classic

I’ve had the KoMo Classic for ages and have used it to mill countless kilograms of flour here at home. It has a solid wood housing and a classic design. It mills very fine flour at a reasonable rate.

GrainMaker 116

The GrainMaker is a hand-operated mill with two large steel burrs. It’s a bit of work to turn the crank, but it produces the finest flour from all the mills I have. The mill is built like a tank and is truly a piece I’ll pass down to the next generation.

Where To Buy Whole Grain Berries For Milling Flour

You can find whole berries at a surprising number of locations, and of course, you can always order large bags online. The sources listed below are some of my favorites, though I encourage you to look around your area for local sources–you may be surprised at what you find!

Note that you can also purchase freshly milled flour from these companies. While it can sometimes be hard to determine how fresh flour is unless you mill it yourself, the flour I purchase from the following places is always high quality. If you want to try working with fresh flour before investing in a mill, these are good places to start.

Freshly Milled Flour FAQs

What’s Next?

Hi, everyone.

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We recently ordered the Komo Fidibus Classic mill, so we’re really looking forward to experiencing freshly milled flour. I’m fairly familiar with the difference of using whole grains (vs. white flour), since for some time I’ve used whole grain flours from a local bakery. I’ll expect a slightly shorter, more dense loaf than what white flour produces.

However, with my own mill, I want to be sure it’s done right – and I’m hoping that those of you who are already comfortable with milling could respond to some queries. At the moment, they include the following:

1. How finely can the Komo Classic grind the grains? How often do you need to run the same batch through the mill a second time, in order to achieve a more open crumb in the baked loaf?

2. Before milling the berries, do you rinse and dry them or just use them directly from the package?

3. With the Komo Fidibus Classic, how long do you usually wait for the flour to cool before mixing it? What is typically the temperature of something like spelt or rye immediately after milling?

Thanks for your input!

All the best
Phillip

Hi Phillip,
I see this post is a week old so you have probably already tried yor new mill and congratulations on getting one of the best. I don’t have the classic instead the slightly smaller 21but I will gladly share what I have found from a couple years of using it.

1.The flour is fine but not as fine as roller milled still good to make bread. Normally I don’t run the whole batch through more than once but sift out the larger pieces with a 40 mesh sieve and regrind them sometimes resift in if I want a high extraction flour instead of whole grain. The results usually fall in the 90-95% extraction range depending on the grain.

2. All the grain I have gotten has been cleaned well and I don’t bother. If you have the option of getting some directly from the field a thorough cleaning would be in order.

3. I don’t wait for any specific time and have ground directly into the mixing bowl. The temperature will depend on the amount of grain yor are grinding. As the stones heat due to the friction of grinding they will transfer increasing heat to the flour. Typically with the 350-500g I grind the temperature is slightly over 100F not high enough to worry about. With the high speed micronizer mill I was using before the Komo the temp could get as high as 140F.

Happy milling,
Stu

Hi, Stu.

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting on the mill to be delivered, so your response remains entirely relevant: I still have zero experience with the mill.

It’s good to know that you normally don’t have to re-grind a batch, though your comment reminds me that I need to get my hands on a mesh sieve, in case larger than desired pieces come through. I once made a couple loaves of spelt with really coarsely milled flour from a local bakery, so I want to avoid the super coarse stuff. It was like biting into the largest ever oatmeal cookie, but without any sugar or cream filling…so in other words, not exciting for a “cookie.”

Wow, that’s great that the freshly milled grains are only around 100F/37.7C. From what I understand, the oils in the grains do better when milling doesn’t set them over 120F or so.

I’ve stocked up on a range of grains and wheat, so now I’m just waiting for the mill to arrive. It’s definitely exciting!

Thanks again for your response.

All the best
Phillip

Your welcome Phillip. I forgot to mention that when making flour it is ground on the finest setting. On the coarser settings I have made cornmeal from organic dent corn, cracked grains for a bread additive, and oats that resemble steel cut for some very good hot oatmeal. The cornmeal was the only occasion that the Komo sort if failed me and that was because the corn was too big to feed into the mill. It had to be preground in an ancient stainless steel container Vita Mix we have hanging about, a very loud and violent process as well as a messy one.

One of the pleasures of having your own mill is deciding what grains or variety of wheat you want to use as well as the proportions and custom grinding for each loaf.

Stu

I am also awaiting my new Mockmill 100. At present, I am making the Tartine No.3 10% rye/whole wheat bread.
The book calls for
rye flour 50g
"High extraction" wheat flour 200g
medium strong bread flour 200g
whole grain wheat flour 50g

Since I don’t have “high extraction”, I have been using
rye 50g
whole wheat flour 75
White whole wheat flour 75
White bread flour 300g
When I start milling my own wheat flour, I’m not quite sure how to substitute. Any ideas about where to start? For the high extraction, can I use the flour straight from the mill? How about the “whole wheat”? Should I be ordering a 40 mesh sifter?
Thanks for any suggestions!

Hi, mflac.

Glad to hear that you’ve also decided to get into milling. Unless I’m mistaken, the way to get certain extraction percentages in your flour is with a sifter, as you suggested – and the 40 mesh sifter should be fine for bread making. To mill grains and then use them just as they come out of the mill would be 100% extraction or “whole grain” flour. If you want to stick with the recipe from the Tartine series, then I think “high extraction” would involve sifting out a bit of the bran.

Note to anybody: Please correct me if I’m wrong!

I have a Nutri-Mill and have found that starting the motor with the stones “open” or not touching and then adjusting the grind setting until I just hear a rub.
Then I add the grain.
After a second I adjust the grind as fine as possible.
This procedure gives me a nice result.
When the grain hopper is just empty, I quickly coarsen the grind to prevent excessive wear to the stones.
Baking with this flour gives me a very dense, 100 percent whole grain loaf. Bolting or sifting 50 percent of the flour through a 40 mesh screen results in a more airy loaf. Less bran to cut all those lovely gluten strands.
If I bolt or sift 100 percent of my freshly milled grain, I get a very open “Tartine like” loaf.
I’ve also found I need to increase my saturation levels to 80 or more when using unbolted flour. That bran sucks up tons of water.
And finally, I found double grinding to be very messy and not worth the extra time and clean up.

I’ve had my Classic about 2-1/2 years. I initially tried an old-fashion hand sifter to remove some of the bran but found this too slow and tiring of my hand. I invested in Komo’s sifting attachment but was very disappointed. The things that I don’t like with it are the need to disassemble/reassemble the mill, the risk of loosing some small springs that separate the stones, and extra cleaning after each use.
I’ve had good success with using a simple sieve of a fine stainless steel screen on a light frame. I started with a Scandicrafts “10.25 inch fine mesh flour sifter” on Amazon. This is about 36 mesh and for me yields about 88% extract. It only costs about $6. It gets some unfavorable reviews, but I find it great if I only use it for flour and keep out of water. With a bowl that is wide enough to accommodate the screen and shallow enough to fit under the output from the mill I am able to rotate and shake the bowl to keep up with the milling.
I’ve also tried a 60 mesh Neeshow screen from Amazon but find that this too fine. I get about 75% extraction but it requires much more shaking. If I use this sifter I first run the flour through the 36 mesh screen to remove the coarser bran. I think this is representative of the large-scale bolting appliances that use a series of screens of successively finer mesh.
I usually mill with a setting of 4-6 clicks backed off from where the stones make contact. I’ve backed off more, but I don’t find that it makes a lot of difference to the extraction rate.
My bran goes into my oatmeal. I don’t run it back through the mill at a finer grind.

Hi Phillip,

Hopefully someone will answer your mill-setting questions.

In the meantime, I can offer specifics about the einkorn amaranth porridge recipe – I didn’t grind or crack the amaranth. It cooks basically as long as rice or steel cut oats, so the amaranth gets fairly soft. Both steel cut oat porridge and amaranth porridge still have texture when cooked thoroughly, but neither can be felt in the crumb of porridge breads (by me at least). I could see the little amaranth grains though (last photo in the recipe’s gallery).

Decorating the outside of the dough with uncooked amaranth or oats is another story - the grains are not soft enough, and would benefit from passing through a mill imo.

Hope this helps.

p.s. I hear you on storage issues. I have a basement, but in the summer it’s in the mid-70s even down there. So, my husband and I compete for basement fridge space (his hops for brewing vs. my whole grain flours). He doesn’t put his grains in the fridge, though, so I’ll ask him for his temp, storage time limits and rationale, and get back to you. I have been copying him and keeping my wheat berries on a shelf in the basement outside the fridge. Figuring the whole grain flour needs the cold more than the intact berries? Flax seeds go in the fridge though because I had a batch of those from Trader Joes smell rancid once before the sell-by date. Nose is so important!

Thanks, Melissa, for your response.

I’ll look forward to hearing more details about how you store grains and hops at your place. That will be helpful. If it’s okay for the intact berries to be stored at slightly higher temperatures, then that would be a relief, since I’ve only been milling them as needed. Once I got the Komo mill, I bought a really large amount of whole berries (i.e., spelt, wheat, and rye), but it dawned on me later that I need to understand how they’ll react in the long term to the temperature of our home. I’d say it normally fluctuates around 75–79F or 23–26C.

On the porridge issue, it’s good to know how you made the amaranth porridge. Do you know whether that’s generally how any porridge would be made – just cooking intact grains for 20–30 minutes? Theoretically, would you be comfortable making, say, a rye porridge just by boiling whole rye berries in water for a bit? Or would you first crack them – or really grind them – with a mill? As mentioned in my initial message, I’ve never made any sort of porridge, so I’m trying to get a good impression of what it involves.

Thanks again!

Sorry it took so long for me to come back to this. Busy week!

So, from the homebrew beer world, my husband’s guidelines are wheat grains/berries need to be under 80F, in a dark place or opaque container, airtight and dry.

He uses anything he grinds within 24 hours. (Beer grain grinding is different from bread, more a crushing, so I don’t use his equipment.)

He agrees that refrigerating whole grain flour is the best way to go. We didn’t discuss freezing. Nor did we talk about hops, but I see you mentioned being curious about them too. He vacuum seals them and freezes them.

It sounds like your apartment temp is okay. I guess I would minimize shelf stock as summer begins, and carry more inventory in the cold months.

At only 20% the total flour, the dough felt pretty good, not sticky. I’m going to try 40% soon. I’m also still working on a milling strategy for the chickpeas. Last time I thought to do a coarse mill followed by a fine milling. But the coarse milled flour needed a long time to cool down before being able to pass thru the mill again. I’m either going to do a much coarser first mill (my husband’s suggestion) or go back to milling everything super fine just once. That worked great when I did it months ago, I just can help think it’s traumatic to the mill lol. It sounds like I’m crushing rocks!

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