Questions for those who grind your own grains

[Tricia O]

I have a couple of questions for those of you who grind your own grains.

Do you find you have to make adjustments to your recipes, and if so, how? We can't get our chicken & dumplings to turn out right, and our cookies somehow fall flat and just don't seem as good (chocolate chip cookies). We have hard red wheat, hard white wheat and soft white wheat.

Also, does anyone grind anything besides wheat in your grinder? I'm just wondering what else we can use it for.

Thanks for any help!

[Carol S]

The main thing I do is to measure my wheat by weight instead of volume, using 5 oz. per 1 c as my conversion ratio. So far this has worked pretty well for me. When I first started doing wheat for our waffles, the batter was coming out too thin. Now instead of trying to measure it out, I just measure 18 oz (for our particular doubled recipe) out on the scale and then dump it in the grinder.

As for other things, thus far the only other thing I've ground is corn. I know you can do beans, and I've been thinking I should research bean flours, but I haven't yet. I did buy 1 package of Ezekiel mix, but I haven't made it. We sure do like the cornbread I make from freshly ground corn, though.

[Michelle]

The only thing I've had to do (but I live at a high altitude) is make sure I use soft wheat for non yeast recipes. Once I learned that my recipes come out fine.

[Tricia O]

What kind of corn do you grind? Where do you get it?

[Carol S]

I just got it at breadbeckers. I use barley in soup, but someday I'll grind some and make some barley bread. That's a quick bread, not a yeast bread. At least the recipe I have is.

And of course the gluten-free folks would grind all kinds of other things, but as far as I know I have no need to go that route, so haven't really investigated all the things they do.