I used the Magic Mill III (see link) for a couple decades but dumped it when we moved to CT about 5 years ago. With just DH & I left at home we don't eat enough bread products anymore to store large quantities of various grains, nuts, seeds, etc. I used to buy wheat berries in 50 lbs. buckets & had 3-4 in the basement along with spelt, rye, oats, popcorn (to make cornmeal), rice & several types of beans.

Now, I use KA flours but freshly ground flour is definately better both in taste & nutrition so I admire you for your decision.

/tricia

Here is a link that might be useful: Magic Mill III (now discontinued apparently)

I used to do so, but I have had to cut down on bread consumption. No question that it makes great breads and baked goods. And, the shelf life of whole grains like wheat berries is far, far greater than the shelf life of the resultant flours made from them.

I have an old electric mill that I got at a thrift store. If I were to buy one today, I would probably go with a Nutrimill. Grainlady hopefully will chime in her recommendations--she has far more insight than us mere mortals :) Google 'Pleasant Hill Grain' for a selection of different electric mills.

If you want a hand powered one, check out Lehman's. Follow the link. They even have the European 'Diamant' which was recommended in Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. However, you need to be really serious about bread baking to buy that--it's $849.

Here is a link that might be useful: Lehman's grain mills.

I've been using a Whisper Mill (the original impact mill, now called a Wonder Mill) for many, many, years, and it's been a workhorse in my kitchen. There's only two of us at home now, but unlike /tricia, I use the mill once or twice a week and make all our breads and baked goods. We consume 4 servings of breads/cereals per day, and they are all homemade, and cooked cereals are milled fresh. If I had to use commercial wholegrain flours, I'd quit baking. It's like saying Cool-Whip is just like real whipped cream, or margarine is like real butter.... Commercial whole wheat flour tastes like dust that comes off country roads compared to freshly milled. There's also NO comparison for nutrition when it comes to fresh and commercial. Fresh wins that battle as well. I guess I'm not telling you anything you haven't already discovered yourself ;-).

You can get exceptionally fine flour with an impact mill which is essential for making fine wholegrain breads and cakes. Coarse flour = coarse bread and awful cake.

If my old Whisper Mill were to die tomorrow I'd immediately get a Nutrimill. It has a few more options than the Wonder Mill that I really like. You can mill a fine-grind corn meal with the Nutrimill - in a Wonder Mill all you can mill is flour. I use a Corona Corn Mill for cornmeal.

You can add the grain without the mill being on with a Nutrimill - you can't do that with the Wonder Mill, it must be running before adding grain/beans/seeds to the hopper or you'll have a BIG problem - the mill can jam.

Like /tricia, I mill a large variety of grains/seeds/beans and keep hundreds of pounds of them in storage.

No one mill does it all, so I have a bevy of mills. I also have a Flaker Mill and make flakes, coarse flour, and a rough-cut grain similar to steel-cut oats. I make all my own multi-grain cereals for cooked cereal or adding to breads, as well as cream of wheat (farina) and cream of rice. Earlier this week I made homemade bulgur and milled the cooked and oven-dried wheat in the Flaker Mill.

I use a seed mill for small seeds/grains like amaranth and teff, as well as oily seeds like sesame, poppy seeds and flax. Both the Wonder Mill and the Nutrimill CANNOT mill small stuff, but both accomodate large things like fava and barbanzo beans, as well as soybeans. I also mill pinto beans into flour to make "instant" refried beans. You can cook pinto bean flour into refried beans in just minutes. A real time and money saver over boiling pinto beans. Bean flour can also be added to baked goods to increase the protein and beans + grain = complete protein. (Note: use small white beans for milling if you are adding it to baked goods. They have the least "beany" taste/flavor.)

I also have a Family Grain Mill (hand-crank and the electric motor for it), but that's my back-up mill should we be without electricity (you have to run the grain through and then run the flour through to get a fairly fine flour). It's a good little mill, but not nearly as good or as fast as an impact mill.

Good luck with your search. I'd like to suggest going to the link below for more information.

-Grainlady

Here is a link that might be useful: Pleasant Hill Grain

Can I just come live with you Grainlady??

I'll clean up, I'll grind, weed the garden, whatever you need! LOL

Deanna

Deanna - You can pick my brain, ask for a list of books to read, get a recipe or two, compare results, all via the message board - but you can't move in....(LOL)

My neighbors all think I'm a freak - a throw-back to the 19th Century, but they never seem to mind the "fruits" of my grain/milling obsession. But then, they don't even know where their kitchens are...

-Grainlady

I would really like to do this, but I'm not sure I'm ready to spend $270 for a grain mill yet. I would like to get a small spice mill - and not a coffee grinder, which is different from a mill.

There must be plenty of people grinding their own grains, in order for these products to be on the market.

BTW, my grandmother invented an electric butter churn that used a washing machine motor. She patented it and made a fair amount of money on the royalties from it. When I was a child, however, my sister and I were forced to churn butter by hand, even though our DGM had invented an electric churn. It was one of the first ones - my DGM was born in 1878.

Lars

Lars, you'd think DGM would have made sure you never had to hand churn butter again. What kind of churn did you have? When we had our cow we had an old Dazey square glass churn...soon learned the blender worked just fine.

I bet grain and mill sales are up. There seems to be a new back-to-the-land surge...all my gardening and 70's self reliance books are going out like crazy in anticipation of a (worse) recession or a depression. Me? I just want good bread, lol.

LOL Grainlady...there's lots of throwbacks where I live.

Thanks for the input, everyone. We're going with the two-speed Nutrimill. We'll take the washing machine motor off the old Retsel and put the crank handle back on.

I used to bake all our bread, but we didn't grind much flour. Apparently DH found a sale....I have seven buckets of wheat coming. Red wheat, white wheat, soft wheat, hard wheat. (Well it was Dr. Seuss's birthday last week...)

I used to grind a lot of my own flour, using a Vita-Mix. I made bread, rolls and buns on a daily basis. However the ex got custody of it *sigh*. Someday, I will buy another one. I am hesitant however, because mine had a stainless steel container, which I have yet to find.

Here is a link that might be useful: Vita-Mix

Lars - Most people don't think a thing about dropping that much money for a rarely-used stand mixer to decorate their kitchen counter with. The investment for the mill paid for itself LONG ago because I've been using this particular mill once or twice a week (or more) for approximately 15 years and it was around $200 back then. Using it is the key...

I can make a loaf of 100% whole wheat bread for 25-50 CENTS (depending on ingredients used and loaf size). My bread is even cheaper if I factor in the FREE wheat I get and the ability to bake it in a solar oven.

Add to that all the hamburger/sandwich buns I make, hot dog buns, cinnamon rolls, scones, muffins, cakes, cookies, pancakes, etc. all made with freshly milled flour. Flour milled from several varieties of wheat, as well as barley, rye, oats, spelt, kamut, buckwheat, sorghum, rice, triticale, corn, millet, quinoa, teff and amaranth, as well as a large variety of beans and other seeds.

The cost of all my grains/seeds/beans I have in storage comes out of my $50/week grocery budget - along with all the other food purchased for our household.

I'll take the mill any day when it comes to a money saving gadget in the kitchen. But like all pricey kitchen gadgets, you have to use them for them to pay for themselves. Otherwise they just end up being expensive "art" or more clutter.

-Grainlady

With the advice from this board, I purchased a Nutrimill several months ago. I absolutely love it! It is so worth the money. I make my own bread with either wheat berries or spelt berries. My husband likes to sing the Green Acres theme song whenever I use it.

Grainlady - Do you have any recipes to share for hamburger/hot dog rolls? Since the bbq season is approaching, I would love to try making my own instead of buying them from the store. Thanks!

Katie, I don't remember the butter churn that well, except that it was wooden, and one of use (my sis or me) had to sit on it while the other one cranked. We did the same thing with our ice cream maker, although we generally had an older male relative crank the ice cream maker while DS or I sat on it (with towels to protect the ice). I don't think the butter churn had any glass parts to it. I remember opening it up and being amazed to find solid butter in it.

I'll have to check on sources for whole grains to see if they are inexpensive here. If I get them at the health food store, they are likely to be fairly expensive. I made Melba toast with the last of my Pumpernickel bread, and that was really good. I love that recipe I used. It has an almost malt flavor, even though I used no malt. I'm almost out of molasses now, but it seems that I rarely use it. However, it is essential to quite a few recipes and is one of the few sweet flavors I like.

As for Green Acres, I tended to identify with Lisa as a child, since I thought we should be living in Manhattan instead of a farm.

Is it possible to make grits with the mill? That's what I had for breakfast this morning. My KA mixer lives on my kitchen cabinet, and I use it several times a day - but mostly for the grater attachment that I leave on. The one expensive (~$100) gadget I have is a Juiceman Juicer, which I bought when I had a passion vine and was getting 60 passionfruit a day. It was so hard to clean that I didn't like to use it unless nothing else would work (which was the case with getting juice from passion fruit). When I got rid of my passion vine (which was threatening to take over the entire back yard and require extensive clean-up to remove dead leaves), I put the juicer into storage. I might get another passion vine, however, and just watch it more closely. I love the flowers as well.

Lars

christineny - Any standard enriched bread recipe will make burger/dog buns, so pick from any of your favorites. You really don't need a special recipe.

I do have some tips I'll share that hopefully will make some sense.

1. If you happen to have muffin top pans (usually 6/pan and are very shallow, about 1/2-inch deep), they work great for helping to form a nice round burger/sandwich bun, but on a cookie sheet is just fine. There are pans designed for both hamburger and hot dog buns, but I've improvised and used what I already have. I also have a Pizza Piccolo Pan (12 shallow impressions - I got it from King Arthur) that I use to make small sandwich buns (1.5-2 oz. dough).

I measure the dough 2-4 oz. for regular burger buns (depending on how large I need them). You can go larger if you like, just remember 1 oz. of bread is a serving, so you can have a lot of bread servings tied up in one bun - it's already at least 2-servings. After you form the dough ball, pat it to about 1/2-inch thick (oil your hands for easy handling of the dough). Cover and allow to rise per usual...

2. The amount of dough for hot dog buns is approximately the same size as the hot dogs you are going to use (also 2-4 oz.), rolled to approximately the same length and size as the hot dog you are using.

I scale (weigh) the dough for hamburger buns and hot dog buns so that they are close to the same size when done.

I bake hot dog buns two at a time in small loaf pans (3-1/4x5-3/4-inches). This is convienent for me because I can bake a couple if I have extra bread dough from making loaves, and we only use 2 at a time and these freeze nicely wrapped in a pop-up sheet of foil I get from Sam's Club.

When the panned hot dog buns are done/cool, I pull the two apart and slice each one down the middle, but not quiet completely through. These are perfect for holding a hot dog that I butterfly open (one cut almost completely through) and grilled open.

You can also place the hot dog size pieces of dough on a baking sheet to raise/bake individually. Another option is to place them in a pan for pull-apart hot dog buns - use a pan about 5-6 inches wide, which is the approximate length of most hot dog buns (disposable 8-1/4x5-1/4x1-inch foil pans work pretty good for 5 hot dog buns for regular hot dogs).

I always keep individually wrapped burger/sandwich buns in the freezer.

-Grainlady

Thanks for the tips Grainlady!!

Does anyone have a strong opinion on if it's cheaper to grind your own flour than to buy it? I read that whole wheat is about $.59/pound, is that right? How does that compare to buying whole wheat flour at the grocery store?

Marybeth -

It's not an opinion, it's a fact, wheat has always beat the price of commercial whole wheat flour. Unless you purchase grain from someplace that prices it per pound at inflated prices...

The last wheat I purchased (August) was $5 for 25-pounds (for a speciality organic wheat). Which is pretty expensive for me, but I was able to save by not having it shipped - I was able to pick it up myself. Twenty-five pounds yields about 100 cups of flour. I can get locally grown wheat even cheaper - 60-pounds for around $12.

Any time you pay someone to process the grain for you you'll always pay more than the grain cost. There's about 18 cents of grain in a box of cereal (from one recent statistic I read). I can make all the multi-grain cereal to cook and add to breads, as well as mill my own flakes for oatmeal, or steel-cut oats for only pennies.

Not to mention milling the grain fresh is the only way to assure you are getting the whole goodness of the grain. Much of the whole wheat flour on the market is nothing more than white flour with some of the bran raked back into it to make it look dark. This is done so that it has a longer shelf life - the wheat germ oil goes rancid very quickly. Even with brands like King Arthur or Hodgson Mills, who actually mill the whole grain for their whole wheat flour, you're getting a very old product that has degraded nutrition and oils that are going rancid quickly. Oils don't have to smell rancid to BE rancid. Once milled, flour can become rancid in a relatively short amount of time Vitamin loss begins as quickly as 3 hours after milling. So for the most healtful breads, it pays to mill your own flour.

-Grainlady

Whether it's cost efficient depends on how much grain you use. When I was milling we had 3 children at home & a constant stream of their friends I was also frequently feeding. We also did more entertaining than we do now.

With just DH & I 95% of the time it no longer is cost effective for me to grind my own grains. I used to purchase in 50 lb. buckets. Today, 50 lbs. of wheat would last longer than I anticipate living!

I suppose I could purchase in small quantity at stores like Whole Foods but that's at least a 50 mile drive & that negates any cost savings on the bread. Also, when I was home milling I stored many different types of grains & beans. That would be an impossible situation for just the two of us. Instead, I purchase specialty flours in small quantity (2-3 lbs.) & store in the garage freezer.

Grainlady's correct about the nutrition being higher with immediately milled grain. But, the truth is that I rarely ground flour every single time I wanted to bake bread. I would grind several pounds at a time & do the same thing as I do today...store in the freezer. If I would have had to grind the flour every time I wanted to make a batch of dinner rolls...well, I'm sure I wouldn't have made as many rolls. :) Maybe, grainlady's mill is much different but mine was time-consuming to clean & if I didn't...bugs got into it. Did you know that earwigs LOVE grain? Speaking from experience, I can tell you that they do. So, I would spend about 30-40 minutes cleaning the mill every time it was used...not something I wanted to do just because DH wanted pancakes for breakfast.

There was a time when I milled all of the grains for our cereals, crackers, breads, pastas, granolas, etc. I'm glad I did when the kids were little. They all prefer whole grains today as adults. But, now...just doesn't make sense. We eat just a small fraction of the grain products we did in our 30s & 40s.

/tricia

I guess I am a "throw-back" as well but maybe not thrown quite so far back as grainlady. I make a lot of bread and always grind my own wheat. My mill sits on my counter all of the time and it only takes a few minutes to grind the wheat. I have small amounts of other whole grains in my extra refrigerator but wheat is what I use most. I have an ample supply stored which I also bought at a good price. I think those of us who did will be very grateful this year, because wheat products are escalating at a rapid rate right now. The last time I checked the price of flour it had increased by 50% from the previous month. My daughter (in another state) said wheat had more than doubled in cost for her to buy and she was speaking of 40 pound bags.

Wheat harvest was low last year in a lot of areas (lots of flooding), exports of grain have been high, and the dollar does not have the value it once did against other currency which makes our food a bargain for other countries. All of these things tend to raise our wheat prices.

Having said that, whole grain is always a bargain to me because of the great taste and nutritional value. It is worth the extra 3 or 4 minutes it takes to grind the flour.

I have totally worn out one mill and have been using my current one for 8 or 10 years. It is The Kitchen Mill by K-Tec and although it is still working it could use some repair. After getting a repair quote of $99 plus $12 shipping, I will probably use it until it no longer works and replace it with another brand. I think the product is good but I have not been happy with the company, both in the initial buy and in the repair quote.

Grainlady - I sometimes make hamburger buns and sub sandwich buns but have never even thought to make hot dog buns. Guess I will have to try that. Thanks.

Happy grinding and happy baking from another "throw-back".