Meet Fannie. And my hard white wheat.

I warned you I was going to talk about it.

Disclaimer:  You are about to enter a very geeky and domestic realm.  Get ready to put on your aprons, ladies.

So, remember what Stuart bought me for Christmas?  Behold, the amazing...the terrific...the fantastic...the exquisite...okay, I think that's enough.  Ahem.  Behold.

There she is, in all her glory.  I shall call her Fannie.  Why?  Because the grinder is old fashioned and homey and I like that name.  It is a Golden Grain Grinder - a brand, come to find out, that is renowned for it's craftsmanship.  It is actually a stone grinder (hello homestead!), designed by Johnnie Kuest, still made today in Filer, Idaho.  The grinder is both electrical and manual, which is exactly what I was hoping for!  That way, if we ever have a power outage, I will still be able to use it.  These retail for waaaay more than we could ever afford, but God works in providential ways, and this grinder was brought to me out of the kindness of a giving heart.  To whom, I shall always remain thankful. 

You know me well enough by now to know that I couldn't WAIT to get my fifty pound bag of hard white wheat to grind in this bad boy.  It took me a week to get it and I was so anxious I almost wet my pants when it arrived!  (On second though, that sensation could have come from trying to haul the fifty pound bag into my car...hmmm...) If I was really cool, I would have grown it myself, but alas, I'm not that cool.  Yet somehow, the world keeps turning.  Imagine.

Hard white wheat is ideal for bread making.  While you can get hard wheat in both red and white, I chose white to begin with because I'm wild and spontaneous like that.  I can grind everything.  Corn.  Wheat.  Quinoa.  Millet.  Oats.  I can make bread flour, cake flour, cereal.... even grits!

So, now I can hear you asking: 
Shaye, why the heck do you worry about grinding your own flour? 

To which I reply:
My dearest, lovely, beautiful reader, it's because when you mill your own flour you get all the nutrients.  And I want them nutrients because I'm greedy!  Flour begins to loose nutrients as soon as it is ground, as the delicate insides of the kernel are exposed to oxygen.  By grinding your flour fresh, you are able to obtain all the nutrients packed inside.  In commercial grinding, the "germ" of the grain is removed.  The germ of the grain is what holds all its nutrients and oils.  It is removed to prolong shelf life of the flour, but in removing the germ all the nutrients are removed as well.  I like to think of grinding my own wheat as a free lunch. I'm paying for the flour either way, but if I grind it myself, I get all the nutrients that would have been absent from commercially milled flour and there are tons of them in flour!  I purchased a fifty pound bag of organic wheat berries for $21.  That's less than .45 cents a pound for organic flour!  Did you life just get better?  Because mine did.

So, you can guess what happened next.  I ground the life out of that wheat.  I really let them kernels have it!  Goodbye, dear kernels.  Fulfill your destiny. 

If I could only describe to you the wonderful aroma of this freshly made flour.  It was so beautiful.  I didn't even know that flour HAD a smell.  But it does, oh friend, does it ever have a lovely fragrance.  I wanted to just bury my face in it.  But I didn't.

I might have licked the flour pan though.  Twice.

For which, I expect not to be judged.
Because trust me, you would have too.