Easy Fresh Milled Flour Baking Tips

Let's discuss how to adapt recipes to fresh flour

First things first, freshly milled flour baking is so beneficial.  It still stuns me how nutrient-packed freshly milled flour is. We have spent so long thinking bread is the problem, but it turns out that processing of flour is the issue. There is such a huge nutritional difference between store-bought flour and home-milled flour.

The short story is that it is home-milled flour puts the entire wheat berry into the mill and gets the entire wheat berry out of the mill.  This means the flour your baking with includes the germ and the bran.   

These portions (the germ and the bran) are typically removed during processing for flour you find at the store.  It's just flour at it's core, but because of the additional active enzymes, healthy oils, and bran the baking process can vary slightly

The same, but a little different.  Unsifted® Blends create flour. It is way healthier, but it is just flour. This fresh flour can replace flour used for any reason in your home! No need to keep that small stash of conventional All-Purpose flour “just in case.”  

 

Can I still use my family favorite recipes?

Yes, and it makes them even more delicious and nutritious!

The addition of bran and germ usually only require slight alterations of some recipe's ratios. Here's the good news! Especially with Unsifted® Basic Blend and Unsifted® Dessert Blend, converting recipes is even EASIER because we blend specific varieties of grain to a proprietary ratio and customers continually tell us it makes it super easy for them to adapt their family recipes to freshly milled flour. 

Below we share more tips for adapting recipes, but most often you will need to add a little more flour due to the brand and germ being in the freshly milled flour.  So when you're starting off we usually recommend making a 1:1 replacement using flour from our Unsifted® Blends and adjusting from there!  No need to stress. The nutrition is worth any imperfections in your finished product until you learn what works best for you!  

Unsifted® created high quality custom grain blends to provide exceptional flavor, nutritional diversity, and premium baking performance.  Our Unsifted® Basic Blend is a high protein bread flour for soft, lofty breads and Unsifted®Dessert Blend is a mild low-protein blend for fluffy pancakes and pastries. 

 

Want perfect and easy recipes right away?

Unsifted® is excited to offer tried and true recipes using freshly milled flour so that you can begin using nutritious flour right away.

Our recipes are written with new bakers in mind. Each recipe includes step-by-step instructions for easy home milling and fresh flour baking, pro tips and more. Checkout these FREE recipes here:

Or if you prefer hardcopy, we sell gorgeous fresh flour recipe cards (make your own fresh flour cookbook) that are printed on premium cardstock, large print for easy reading, and the pictures are stunning to fit perfectly in your kitchen.

Want to adapt your recipes to freshly milled flour?

Below are two different personalities of bakers.  We know not everyone falls within these two categories, but they help organize the tips so we hope you have some fun with it too :)

Which type of baker are you? 

 

 

Person A:  The Rule Follower / Convenience Pro

The Rule Follower / Convenience Pro is someone who may be a new to milling (or baking!), loves step-by-step instructions, doesn’t have the time to tinker with recipe ratios, and/or is looking for tried and true recipes to easily incorporate whole grains into their lifestyle. Hello to all my like-minded, first-born, rule followers out there!

We recommend using the Unsifted® recipes to build your confidence with fresh flour. These recipes have been tailored to fresh flour use and are thoughtfully organized with step-by-step instructions, pro tips, and recommendations. They also include multiple variations (along with suggested measurements!) for each recipe.

There are lots of recipes online as well, just be sure to search for “fresh flour”, "freshly milled flour", “wholemeal”, or “whole grain flour.”

Here are just a few things to keep in mind if you are using Unsifted® flour in a conventional flour recipe:

• Using the WonderMill®, on the “Bread” setting, 1 cup of grain makes roughly 1 1/2 cups of freshly milled flour.
• Using the WonderMill®, on the “Pastry” setting, 1 cup of grain makes roughly 1 3/4 cups of freshly milled flour.
• Unsifted® Basic Blend: If the recipe is for a sandwich bread, artisan bread, hamburger bun, cinnamon roll, muffin, or another type of bread, we recommend you use our Basic Blend.  Also use it for any recipe that calls for a hard wheat (i.e., red hard wheat, white hard wheat, Kamut, durum, etc).  Basic Blend has approximately 13% protein, so it is comparable to a commercial store-bought Bread Flour.
• Unsifted®Dessert Blend : If the recipe is for a dessert, breakfast, pie crust, biscuit, or other pastry, then we recommend you use our Dessert Blend for fluffy goodness. It has approximately 9.5% protein, so it makes a great pastry flour.

Our Unsifted® Recipe Cards make all this super simple. They list the exact amount of grain needed instead of the amount of flour required for each recipe- so there's no math required, and you never even have to measure any flour! No more leveling with the flat side of a butter knife! 

Welcome Rule Follower / Convenience Pro! We are so glad to have you here. Thanks for trusting us to come alongside you in this delicious journey! 

 

Person B: The Kitchen Adventurer

The Kitchen Adventurer is someone who may have a pile of old recipes from their All-Purpose flour days that are too tasty and have too much sentimental value to leave behind. They want to venture off the Unsifted recipe path and create magic of their own with their new fresh flour. They like experimenting and just want a little help knowing where to start.

In our experience, there’s no magic conversion. The fats and desired textures vary between each recipe, so it’s not quite the same. Here are a few helpful hints to consider as you start your adventure:

• First of all, please see the basics described above under Person A.
• Fresh flour is warm after grinding - For pastries, consider placing the flour cannister in the fridge for a while so the flour will be cool when you cut the butter in.
• Alter the amount of fresh flour for your recipes: 
• As a general rule-of-thumb for breads, use 20-30% less fresh flour as compared to conventional flour called for in recipe. That’s roughly 3-7 Tbsp less fresh flour, per cup, of conventional flour that is called for. So much of this is personal preference, so just enjoy the ride to creating your masterpiece!  Of note, I notice that I often don't have to adjust recipes much, if any, for quick breads, just yeasted.
• If a pastry or dessert recipe calls for all-purpose flour, then for your conversion to Dessert Blend, you’ll need to increase the amount of your Unsifted pastry flour used by approximately 1/4 cup per every cup of all-purpose/hard wheat flour that is called for.
• Fresh flour is thirstier than conventional flour - It will absorb considerably more water, so the next thing to try altering after the flour is potentially the amount of water. We’d suggest starting with either the flour or water alteration (one at a time) since they are interrelated. 
• Fresh flour includes the germ, so there is more oil content - After trying the recipe initially, we suggest trying to adjust the flour first (see above), but then if the texture is off or too oily, consider reducing the oils/fats in your recipe to account for the Vitamin E and other oils in the germ. This isn’t required in most recipes, primarily just for delicate cakes or pastries.
• Fermentation occurs faster due to the nutrients in the bran and germ.  These nutrients "feed" the yeast to thrive. Especially be aware of this with your sourdough starter! You may need to adjust feeding times accordingly.
• Let your doughs rest - The bran in whole wheat flour takes longer to soak up liquids, so if your dough seems too sticky or too thin, consider letting it rest and coming back to it after a bit of time (six to eight minutes is the average time required for gluten to hydrate). Remember to error on the wet side for consistency, as a wet bread equals more crumb. Fresh flour doughs may look and feel a little different than conventional flour doughs, but you will get the hang of it in no time!

Welcome, Adventurer!  We are happy you are here and would love to learn from you, too!  We look forward to hearing from you in our Collective community page, as well!

Happy Unsifted baking, all!