This is something I have to share with you. It’s a trick so simple, so fast, with such great results.
Do you do a lot of baking? Any baking? Do you ever run across a recipe that calls for an unusual type of flour – like or oat or rice, or coconut? Or maybe you’ve heard that flour gets old after a while and loses a lot of the nutritious value (assuming it isn’t over processed to start with).
I have dreamed about milling my own flour, but I don’t own a flour mill and I wasn’t about to buy yet another gadget to stuff somewhere in my compact, tightly packed kitchen. Then I discovered that you can make flour yourself – in a blender!
Yes, my friends – that blender you’ve been reserving for making smoothies, pureeing soups…The homely, standard home appliance has just raised your baking to a whole new level.
(As a side note: if you haven’t yet bought an immersion blender and you like a smooth pureed soup, try this one – I have had mine for several years now and use it 3-4 times per week. This is a workhorse appliance – buy the best you can afford and you’ll have it for years.)
Whole grains keep a lot longer in the cupboard than flour does – your flour actually ages quite quickly, and if you are buying organic flour without any of the preservatives normally added by big name flour companies, you’ll notice that the expiration date is typically listed as only a few months after your date of purchase. This less of a problem with flours you may use more often, but what if a recipe calls for oat flour, spelt flour or rice flour, and you just don’t happen to have any on hand? Whole grain spelt kernels something I’ve recently started stocking in my pantry since I learned this trick – but most people I know keep oatmeal and rice around all of the time. The same trick works with wheat kernels, barley kernels, or any type of grain it’s whole form such as rye or millet.
Bread bakers will tell you that fresh flour makes the world of difference in bread, but unless you are baking and selling bread in large quantities, chances are good that the bag of flour you’re keeping is getting close to retirement age. Do yourself a favor and try the fresh stuff. Here is great post on the subject of fresh milled flour if you are interested in reading more.
When making flour, you want to start with a minimum of 1.5 cups of whole grains in the blender. The reason is that if you don’t have enough grains, they’ll just fly around like sand grains in a wind storm, never forming flour, making a lot of noise and leaving you with a mess.
If you are in Finland and looking for good quality Organic whole grains, Malmgård sells wheat, spelt, barley, oats, rye, and emmer/farro in stores around Finland. For Spelt, try SunSpelt in Finland. I know that specifically Stockmann Herkku and Eat & Joy Maatilantori carry them. In the US, Whole Foods Market sells them as well. You can find whole grains from other farms at your local health food store or Co-op as well, or order them online. Your local grocery store may be a great source as well, though not, perhaps, for organic grains.
Fresh Ground Flour
1.5 – 3 cups / 3 -6 dl of whole grains of your choice (wheat, rye, spelt, barley, rice, millet…)
Pour the whole grains into your blender. Process for one minute. Stop the blender and stir the mixture with a rubber spatula. Process for one more minute. Repeat 2 more times.
Place a sifter or a fine mesh sieve over a bowl. Pour the flour mixture into the bowl and sift it so that any larger chunks are separated and you get a nice light flour. The flour is best if used immediately, but can be stored in a glass jar for use in the refrigerator for 2 weeks or in the freezer for one month.
Your end volume of flour will be slightly greater than the volume of whole grains you started with.
Can i make the same using Brown Rice ? will it turn out to be exactly the same as u make plz ?
Hello Sheetal, thank you for your question! Brown rice is really hard and may be difficult for your blender to handle, depending on what kind of blender you have. Even with white rice, the flour didn’t turn out super smooth, so I needed to sift it. But give it a try and see it how it works for you! Best, Ann
Couple of things – while this IS a brilliant thing for soft grains, rice can absolutely murder a ‘normal’ blender. Right after I was diagnosed with celiac I gave this a try and actually ended up with tiny metal and plastic chips in the resulting mess. Unless you have something like a vitamix… I’d give rice a skip. (Oat flour however goes together like a dream even in a cheap blender!) Also, I have had friends get excited at the thought they could whip up some GF flour to bake something for me using the blender method and unless you are using a dedicated for non-gluten-bearing grains only blender, please don’t. Cross contamination is a beast.
And finally? Careful – you are opening a door that IS going to eventually drag you down the path of buying a flour mill. Sure, it starts innocently with grinding some fresh flour for ‘just one loaf’ and next thing you know, all bread made with old conventionally purchased flour tastes flat. You start daydreaming about fresh flour in your cookies, your pancakes. You wonder “will there be a noticeable difference if I use freshly ground in a roux?” (Yes. There is.) And then the questions like “Hmm. Is blue popcorn different then blue cornmeal?” (yup) “I wonder what wild rice, buckwheat, forbidden black rice and oat flour would taste like…” (heavenly!) begin to swirl in your head. It’s a slippery slope and you are playing with fire here if you really REALLY can’t find room for one more gadget in the kitchen.
Personally though… I’ve found it is almost always possible to find just a few more inches of space (ceiling hooks, for example?) when it comes to things like this. And honestly? When I finally decided to go ahead and get the flour mill (mainly for rice & beans) I found to my shock it had paid for itself in less then 2 months.
Hi Jenna, Thanks for the note! I agree with you on the rice – I tried it a couple of times now and it didn’t get as smooth as I wanted it to be. Seems to work OK with the other grains I’ve tried, but point well – taken and I really appreciate the tips. As for a grain mill – you may be right. I’ve already had so much fun experimenting with homemade flours in the blender, I can only imagine how addicting it can become.
And now I’ll have to try fresh flour in roux…