Farming for self sufficiency

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Nowadays the whole process is complicated in the extreme. The wheat goes through a cockle cylinder which gets out small weed seeds, a barley cylinder which gets out large ones, a scourer which is a cylinder lined with emery, a washer which is what it says it is (the wheat floats while the rubbish sinks), whizzers which centrifuge the wheat to dry it, the dry brusher, and then the main thing—the break roller. This splits the grain and sets the endosperm free. The little bits of endosperm are then called semolina. Then come the grinding rollers, or reduction rollers which grind the semolina into fine white flour. The flour then goes through silk screens and the germ is all got out. (Hovis process this germ separately and then return it to the flour.) But for white flour it is left out. As little as 20 per cent of the whole meal may be extracted as flour in the case of 'patent flour', but 'straight run' flour is about 70 per cent of the grain. The rest goes for animal food. Lucky animals, because they get the best of it. The flour then has various additives put to it: chlorine dioxide to bleach it to an even whiter-than-white whiteness so beloved by the working class housewife (who is still reacting from the time when the upper class could afford white bread and the working classes could not), ammonium persulphate, potassium bromide which causes the dough to retain more carbon dioxide and therefore make a bigger loaf for less flour, glyceryl mono-stearate or polyoxy ethelene stearate which are anti-staling agents—in other words they make the stuff keep longer—and sometimes Epsom salts or Glauber salts. Ground chalk is often added to it: in fact in England the law is that some calcium must be added to it to take the place of the calcium so laboriously milled out of it, and certain vitamins are added too.

Some grain is milled as whole meal and that is exactly what it says. Nothing is added to it and nothing is taken away. This can be finely or coarsely ground according to taste. Other grain is milled as wheat meal. This has the bran removed. What you will get, if you mill your grain yourself will be whole meal.

BAKING

As for baking, nothing, in cooking, is easier except possibly boiling an egg. But it is very easy to go wrong in the latter operation. I am a terrible cook, but I never had the slightest difficulty in baking perfect bread, and nor need anybody else who is fit to live outside an institution.

To bake bread do this last thing at night

To make six medium loaves take four and a half pints of a water about blood heat (don't mess about with thermometers put in a mixing bowl, chuck in two ounces of salt and two ounces of sugar and a tablespoonful of yeast. When the yeast has dissolved pour in enough flour to make a (sticky mush—such as you might feed to the pigs. Stir it well, make sure that every bit of flour is wetted. You must not have too much dough in the bowl or it will overflow when it rises.

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