Where to buy wheat to grind into flour

mtviolet · #21 01/20/15, 10:55 PM

Being in Montana, I buy Wheat Montana berries, at the local Wheat Montana bakeries, and I use a made in Montana Grainmaker grain mill.

Marilyn · #22 01/20/15, 11:47 PM

You are a very lucky person, mtviolet! If I remember right, Montana Wheat is grown without chemicals. Is that true?

rambler · #23 01/21/15, 06:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marilyn

You are a very lucky person, mtviolet! If I remember right, Montana Wheat is grown without chemicals. Is that true?

Most farmers balance out their soil with some types of fertilizer. If you haul grain away from the field, you have to pit something back into the soil.....

In wheat growing areas of the arid west often that is the only crop that grows well, and so weeds are controlled with some herbicides early on in the growing period. Otherwise certain weeds tend to build up in those fields.

Paul

Horseyrider · #24 01/21/15, 10:54 AM

I get mine by the 50# sack from the Mennonite grocery. I bring it home, put it in glass gallon jars, and store it in the basement where it's cool. I use a Nutrimill (an impact type mill) to grind it as I use it.

I agree with the previous poster that there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with the KitchenAid mill for those who want to make bread more than as a rare treat. If I remember right, the grind is uneven, takes a crazy long time to grind, and it takes a big toll on the motor. Google around and see what information you come up with. I do use my KitchenAid for kneading the dough though. For the difference in price and the fact that I make ALL the baked goods that are eaten here, it just made sense to buy a mill that would perform better.

I know some folks are squicked out by the idea of using feed store wheat. It may be more difficult to get consistent performance from it in the kitchen, but there's nothing at all wrong with using it. If you make sure it's well cleaned, then test out a few loaves with it, I think you'll find something with which you can adjust your recipes and get some really nice bread. I can't imagine anything harmful surviving the 350-400 degree temperatures for the length of time they're in the oven.

GeneMO · #25 01/21/15, 06:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by COWS

Wheat for flour must not have wild onion seed in it, makes the bread taste terrible. Farmers prevent wild onions or wild garlic by spraying with herbicides, 2, 4d being the old standby, at least in the southeast. If you grow your own in a SMALL patch you can harvest by hand and avoid the wild onions.

Threshing by hand: basically forget it. In early times people would level off a section of hard packed dirt, pile the harvested wheat on it, and walk cattle around on it to thresh the grain. Bible references: "muzzle not the ox that treadeth the corn", King James version of the bible, referring to an idea that the working cattle deserved a bite now and then. Also, King David bought somebody's threshing floor to build the Temple on.

After the grain was threshed, it was cleaned by taking forks, no doubt the wooden kind, and throwing the straw, chaff(husks around the seed) into the air. The wind would blow the straw and chaff to one side and the heavier clean grain would fall in a pile. Obviously, this needed to be done on a dry, windy day.

Threshing by hand was done by piling the wheat one the ground and beating it with flails, which were two fairly long sticks tied end to end together with leather thongs. I estimate a no mare than a 2 foot thong. Then it was thrown into the air as described above.

My daughter tried some wheat in her garden and I generously tried threshing it. It was a very time consuming process for a small amount of wheat. Made good bread, however.

Europe in the Middle Ages: Peasant lived on some "lord's" estate and paid rent in the form of a share of the crop. To get more income, the lords required that the peasant's wheat be ground at the lord's mill. Private ownership of small hand mills was outlawed and the lord's men would occasionally go around and search the peasant's home, confiscating the had mills, called Querns. A little Google search on the subject might be interesting. Monasteries had land and had the same sort of set up to control the peasants and get more money, well, actually the millers charged a percent of the crop, 10-15 % I think, for the milling. At any rate one monastery in Northern Europe had confiscated a bunch of querns and floored a room with them. During a period of unrest the peasants raided the room and took up the floor, putting the querns back in use.

COWS

Nobody around here uses 2-4D to speak of. Generally the wild onions tend to be on marginal ground, with thin stands of wheat. We are producing 75-85 bu wheat now and the denseness of the stand keeps weeds down.

Gene