How to Make Flour

Learn how to make homemade flour, from choosing a grain mill to grinding technique, with these handy tips.

By Tabitha Alterman
Updated on February 18, 2021
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by Tim Nauman

Fresh, homemade flour is more nutritious and flavorful than store-bought flour. Learn how to make flour using a grain mill with these handy tips.

Why Make Homemade Flour?

Here are a few of the great reasons to try your hand at homemade flour:

Flavor. Freshness, which can be equated with both flavor and nutrition, is the No. 1 reason to mill flour. The moment after grains become flour is the moment of the flour’s maximum potential flavor, after which oxygen goes to work scavenging flavor molecules and degrading fatty acids. Some types of fresh flour, including buckwheat, corn, oats, and rye, are even more susceptible than wheat to fast degradation. This is no different than what happens to coffee beans once they’re ground. Many coffee aficionados wouldn’t think of brewing coffee with beans ground a week or more ago.

Variety. With more than thirty thousand varieties of wheat in existence, you’d think options for nutritious flours would be numerous. Sadly, this is not the case. Research conducted by Dr. Donald R. Davis, a former nutrition scientist at the University of Texas, demonstrates how wheat has declined nutritionally over the last 50 years as farms have become more industrial.

“Beginning about 1960,” Davis told me, “modern production methods have gradually increased wheat yields by about threefold. Unfortunately, this famous Green Revolution is accompanied by an almost unknown side effect of decreasing mineral concentrations in wheat. Dilution effects in the range of 20 percent to 50 percent have been documented in modern wheats for magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, selenium, phosphorus, and sulfur, and they probably apply to other minerals as well.”

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