Nutrition experts claim that whole wheat is very good for me. Experience tells me that whole wheat products taste nasty. My prior experience using whole wheat flour to make bread resulted in bricks. Great for building a fireplace or a pyramid, but not suitable for eating. Nothing good ever resulted from my early forays with whole wheat flour. I solved the problem the same way other bakers do, ignore the nutrition experts and use white flour.
A couple months ago, I learned something that intrigued me. Whole wheat flour is something of a misnomer. You can’t even buy whole wheat flour at the supermarket. The reason is quite simple, the bran and the germ of the wheat go rancid within hours unless the flour is kept from oxidizing. Since storing bulk flour in a fridge/freezer is impractical at the store and your home, both must be removed. You’ve heard of wheat germ right? It’s got a nice nutty flavor and it’s full of vitamins and nutrients. It comes in sealed containers that must be stored in the fridge. Well, that is what is missing from your flour, as well as the bran. It gets replaced by synthentic nutrients.
None of that is newsworthy. However, a bunch of different sources led me to believe that whole wheat flavor is a function of freshness. What you can buy at the supermarket isn’t very fresh and the additives and preservatives are why it has poor flavor. There are only a couple ways to get fresh whole wheat flour. One can buy it direct from a mill or co-op, where they vacuum pack it with nitrogen so it doesn’t oxidize. Once opened it must be refrigerated or frozen to keep it fresh. Shipping is expensive.
The other option is to mill it yourself. The advantage to milling is that your flour is always fresh (grind it as necessary). Wheat berries are purchased in bulk and they last for decades. We buy wheat berries for $0.59/lb at Whole Foods. The disadvantage is that we had to buy a mill. I did a bunch of research on mills and bought a Nutrimill.
The results have been quite surprising, living up to all the claims. I started out by making a loaf of whole wheat bread. The flavor was actually quite good, but too dense for sandwiches. We finished it up as a batch of superb french toast. My next batch of bread was wonderful. I shared a loaf with our human neighbors who claim to like it as well. Whole wheat that isn’t icky! Pleased with the results, I tried it next in pancakes, again with superb results. I have since taken loaves to numerous social events and everyone likes my bread. Even the kids come back for seconds!
We had bought a few different kinds of wheat so Jen used some of the soft wheat (lower gluten) for flour in her chocolate chip cookies. They too were excellent! She baked up a couple dozen extras and we shared them with our neighbors. Nathan and Vicki weren’t home so we left a dozen cookies with their two teenage sons. Twenty minutes later Nathan returned from dropping Vicki off at work and all the cookies were gone.
Excepting my experiments such as the Thanksgiving loaves where I used soft wheat instead of hard wheat to see what difference it made, I have had consistently good results. When I do experiment, such as my first attempt at sourdough, our furry neighbors find it quite acceptable. They stop by our back porch each night to see if I’ve made anything new that fails to meet human consumption standards.