On making flour for baking

In my previous post I shared a recipe for Dutch pancakes. I don’t make them that often, and one time when I wanted to make them I found that some of the flours I needed had gone stale. I think it’s hard to stock many different flours and use them all up before they go off. I don’t want to use only wheat flour because I think a more varied diet is healthier and also more fun – but yes, it is hard to keep an eye on all those flours.

I read about milling your own flour somewhere before, but I thought that would be a lot of effort. However, since I already owned a coffee grinder (which I had only used for grinding seeds, not coffee!) I thought I’d just give it a go, and it was surprisingly easy and fast! Buckwheat ground down in a few pushes of the button, so a few seconds. Porridge oats did as well. And my simple and cheap grinder didn’t even have a problem grinding whole oats, although the flour from them came out a lot coarser. I’ll probably grind them for a longer time next time.

Buckwheat groats and homemade buckwheat flour

Millet and homemade millet flour

The type of coffee grinder I use for milling flours

Bottomline: if you want to bake with lots of different flours and you don’t need very large amounts of them, try milling your own! Especially if you already have the whole grains in stock, anyway.

N.B. I have tried making quinoa flour but the texture turned out much coarser than that of bought quinoa flour, and it also had rather a strong quinoa flavour, which wasn’t very nice in baking.