• 15oz hard white spring wheat ground finely
• 13oz water
• 8oz sourdough starter
• 2t Celtic sea salt
• 1t sprouted wheat ground finely

Mix all the ingredients the night before (preferably with a recently refreshed starter). It helps to break the starter into numerous small pieces to mix into the rest of the dough. Knead with wet hands for a minute or so to incorporate the starter. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning knead the dough with wet hands about 8-10 times until the ball is tight. Put the dough back into the bowl (big enough so it can double in size) and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Allow to rise till about 3:00pm. Longer is fine, but the longer it sits, the more sour it will be.

Take the dough out of the bowl and fold it over gently a few times. Shape it into a ball (find a nice description of how to do that on the web somewhere) making sure to get the outer skin tight or snug. Place the bread on parchment on a pizza peal or edgeless cookie sheet. Allow it to rise for another 2 hours or so till it is about double in size.

Place pizza stone on bottom rack. Place a cookie sheet full of water on the top rack. Preheat oven for at least one hour to 500°.

Slash the top of the bread in a plus pattern to about ½in deep. Quickly slide the bread onto the pizza stone. Close oven and reduce heat to 450°. Bake for 25 minutes. Turn 180° and bake for another 20-30 minutes. The bread is done if it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.

It takes some practice to get everything right. The only thing that isn’t quite right yet is the bottom is a little too dark. My technique will improve with time. I’m also still playing with the sprouted wheat flour hoping to speed rising time.

• 15oz hard red spring wheat
• 12oz tap water
• 2T unpasteurized apple cider vinegar or whey
• 1/4t active dry yeast
• 1 1/2t celtic sea salt

Grind the wheat as finely as possible. Mix in yeast and salt. Add the vinegar to the water. Make a well in the middle of the flour mixture and pour in the liquid. Stir until mixed, cover, and refrigerate over night.

In the morning wet your hands and knead the dough about 10 times. Don’t do it much more than this. I have succeeded in over-kneading my dough after an overnight soak and a very short knead. Cover and let sit at room temperature.

Sometime in the afternoon (anywhere from 3-5) place a piece of parchment paper on an edgeless cookie sheet or pizza peel. Wet your hands and dump out the dough on the counter. Gently fold the dough as you would a business letter and then again once the other direction. Tuck the seams gently underneath – shaping it into a ball – and place in the center of the parchment. Sprinkle a little flour on top and cover with a towel. Let it rise for 1-2 hours. Don’t let it rise too long.

Place a pizza stone on the center oven rack. Place a pan of water on the bottom rack and preheat the oven to 450F. Let the oven preheat at least 30 minutes. Loosen the parchment paper on the cookie sheet so that it slides easily. With a quick jerk slide the bread onto the pizza stone. Bake for about 30 minutes.

So far the inside comes out perfect. The top sometimes gets a little too brown. I think more steam seems to help keep the bread from getting too dark.

UPDATE (9/16/2007): If found that if you put the pizza stone too high in the oven, you will get overdone crust. I put the stone on the lowest or next to lowest rack and then put the pan of water on the top rack.

I also recently tried using hard white spring wheat instead of the red. It make a much lighter colored bread. However, it also seems to be more thirsty. I bumped the water up to 13oz. The extra water seems to make the crumb a little more open as well.

This is my first attempt at hamburger buns. I haven’t been able to get my sourdough starter started ever since I killed my last one (purposely). So I’ve been making a “soaked” bread. That is, the flour is soaked in an acidic solution for a while. Since I use raw vinegar (with the mother of vinegar still in it) for the acid component, it might also be called a fermentation. I’ve developed the following technique based on the famous New York Times no-knead bread recipe.

• 15oz hard red spring wheat
• 12oz less 1 tablespoon cool water
• 1 tablespoon raw apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 teaspoon yeast (either active dry or instant are fine)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt

Grind the wheat into flour as finely as you are able. Mix this all up in the evening, cover, and put it in the refrigerator over night. Take it out in the morning and knead it by hand for about one minute. Put it back in the bowl and cover. Leave it at room temperature.

In the afternoon, liberally cover a pizza peel or edgeless cookie sheet with cornmeal. Take the dough out of the bowl and fold it 3 ways like a letter. Fold it again the other way. Put it on the pizza peel or cookie sheet. Cover it with a towel and wait for it to rise a bit. Probably about 2 hours or so, but whatever seems right.

Put a cookie sheet in the very bottom of the oven and fill it with water. Put your pizza stone on the middle rack. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Let it continue preheating after the oven thinks it is preheated. It’s lying. Preheat it at least 20 minutes. When the oven is ready quickly slide the dough off the peel directly onto the stone. Bake for about 30 minutes. I haven’t yet found the perfect baking time. Last time I did it 35 minutes and the crust was a bit too brown.

For the buns in the above picture I first folded the dough and then cut it into 5 pieces (6 might be better). I shaped them gently into balls then I put them on a sheet of parchment paper on an edgeless cookie sheet. The rest is the same.

I’ve also made this into bread sticks and pizza.

Nevertheless, I did make bread this week using a recipe I found on the discussingnt group (hat tip to Shelly in Tasmania) using a vinegar soak and commercial yeast with a small amount of baking soda. The bread turned out well and my wife and son like it better than my previous bread. It makes a nice sandwich bread. Nonetheless I consider commercial yeast a stop-gap measure. Natural leavening not only makes the bread more nutritious, but adds a lot more character to the bread.

I have occasionally succeeded in making less sour bread by feeding my starter a lot and refrigerating the bread dough and things, but I finally decided to try culturing a new starter. I received Peter Reinhart‘s Crust and Crumb for Christmas, so I set about to follow his directions for a mild starter. The key for a mild starter is to have a very firm starter, more like bread dough. My starters in the past have all been more like pancake batter.

My old starter was cultured with rye flour from a bag – non-organic. Peter recommends using organic flour for at least the initial batch of starter since more yeasts and bacteria live on the surface of organic grains. This starter is made with my home ground wheat instead of rye.

I was really impressed when after 48 hours it was already doubling in size! This could be the best thing to happen to my bread yet. (The tape is the height it was when I put it in the cup.) By Sunday it should be tripling.

I had been making corn torillas with masa harina, but Shari wanted me to try to make flour tortillas. So here’s the recipe I developed for whole wheat flour tortillas.

• 2 cups soft white wheat freshly ground into flour (or about 3c whole wheat flour)
• 2 tablespoons of whey
• 1 teaspoons of sea salt (I’m currently using RealSalt)
• 1 tablespoon of oil (I used extra virgin olive oil)
• 1 cup of lukewarm water

Mix all of this stuff up and let it sit for 12-24 hours at room temperature. It’s probably better to leave the salt out and knead it in just before baking as it will allow the lacto-bacilli in the whey to work better.

Pull dough off in 2 inch diameter balls and flatten in a tortilla press or baker. Heat on both sides until done. Keep warm in the over (or toaster oven) on a plate covered by a damp paper towel till ready to serve.

If they stick to your press, you may want to add some extra flour to the dough or flour the press. The press I am using is Teflon coated (gasp) so works well with this recipe.

These are wonderful fresh, but get quite stiff if they sit around for very long. I found that they make a nice chewy snack after a day or so, but won’t work for burritos anymore unless you seriously rehydrate them.

As far as I can tell, this book has no competition. There are no other books out there covering this topic. It is loaded with information about how commercial flour is milled, what get’s destroyed, etc. It also tells you about all the different home grain mill milling mechanisms (e.g. impact, stone burr, roller, etc.) and their pluses and minuses. It has a lot of information about different manufactures and how to contact them. It also has a wealth of information about different types of wheat, dough conditioners, and recipes for various breads.

In short, if you are considering (or even if you are already an avid home-miller) milling your own grain, this is a must have book. Don’t go out and buy a grain mill and then order this book. For the small price you pay for this book you could save yourself a lot of pain and heartache. Buy it, read it, THEN order your grain mill.

That said, I do have some complaints. The author, Marleeta Basey, has completely bought into the whole low-fat agenda. She preaches low-fat high-fiber diets throughout the book. Naturally, Nourishing Traditions cooks will have to disagree with this preaching. There are about 3-4 chapters of nutrition information, which in my humble opinion are completely unnecessary. They talk about vitamins, minerals, fat and other things and there are a large number of speculative statements like… this study showed that vitamin x MAY do such and such. These are the same chapters that rail against fat. My recommendation is to take these chapters with a grain of salt and get down to the practical information in the book.

On the whole, I highly recommend this book. Even if you are not planning to mill your own grains, this book may change your mind.

After taking out the dough and playing with it, I discovered that it was now a bit like pancake batter and didn’t stick together anymore. I over-kneaded it (a first for me)! I was about to throw out the dough and decided to see if I could make something useful out of it. So I let it sit for the rest of the day to ferment.

That night, I threw in some baking soda and baking powder, poured it out on an edgeless cookie sheet, and baked it. It spread out to about 1 inch thick. It was very tender – almost muffin or biscuit-like – and nothing like a yeast or sourdough bread should be. However, it had a very nice crust and nice flavor. We ate it up much faster than we usually eat a loaf of bread as it made a very nice munching bread.

Moral: Don’t throw out ruined dough.

I discovered that there is a widening crack in my attachment for my Bosch Universal. The ebay ad said there was a crack, but I had not been able to find it until now. Perhaps it was exacerbated when I dropped it. At any rate, my flour has become much coarser now.

My spending limit is $250. I’ve been looking at both impact mills and stone mills. I looked at some of the less expensive steel burr mills, but none of them will grind fine enough for what I want to do.

Currently I have narrowed the list down to 2 mills:

• The Nutrimill – an impact style mill that pulverizes the grain at super high speeds into micron size particles.
• The Komo Fidibus 21 – A German stone mill that is visually stunning and well reviewed.

At this point I am leaning toward the Fidibus 21, but am still considering the Nutrimill. I am primarily concerned about possible high temperatures and possible excessive starch damage caused by an impact mill.

I would love to hear comments on either of these mills (or any other mill for that matter) from people who have used them.