Customer Reviews

Flour Power: A Guide To Modern Home Grain Milling

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm a bread-baking microbiologist with a different take on this book. One reviewer thought it had too much info but I think when an author examines a topic microscopically - without leaving a
who-what-where-when-why question about any aspect - the reader can't lose. And even if you happened to decide milling wasn't for you (a possibility another reviewer speculated about), the book is still a treasure trove of tidbits, details, history and how-to's that make for satisfying reading on a hot-tea evening.

Once I got my mill (I took one of the "quick-pick" options the author provided.) and some good high-protein wheat (I'm lucky to have the legendary Bob's Red Mill within driving distance.), it
was surprisingly easy to get bread without a hassle every three days or so. Although the bread machine makes a crust slightly thicker than I like, the rest of the bread is incredible and it's truly a time-saver. As the author of this book stresses, it's not the milling that takes time, it's the bread making.

Another book I recommend to real gourmet bakers (the kind who wouldn't stoop to a bread machine) for some delicious and heart-healthy ways to use home-milled grains is "Mediterranean
Grains and Greens" by Paula Wolfert. Similarly well written and detailed, it provides a tantalizing glimpse of a whole new realm of possibilities for using whole grains (and greens).

This book is really a winner. The author obviously writes from experience, but she also provides source information to back up her "facts" (which are otherwise just author assertions, in my opinion). Because I'd done what I thought was extensive research on grain mills before I stumbled onto this book, I was a bit disgruntled about how much very important stuff I'd missed. For example, I'd been repeatedly cautioned about keeping milling temperatures "low" without a clue to what temperatures we were talking about. This author explained exactly what damage was done to which components at what temperatures, what the damage was and what authority had said so -- now that's the kind of detail I like.

I was also mezmerized by the information on wheats, amused by what another reviewer complained about as the mundane details of handling and storing grains (all new to me...), and encouraged and inspired by the prospect of actually liking the switch to whole-grains that a recent heart attack had mandated for me. In short, this book is informative, well written, well documented and a lot of fun to read.

My wife read this book and was so excited about making bread at home, that I had to read the book myself to see what all the ruckus was about. I'll have to admit that before I opened the book, I thought that milling raw wheat and making bread was something reminiscent of the "foxfire" series of do-it-yourself books. Was I ever wrong. The book is at once engaging and entertaining. Ms. Basey's research is heads above any I've read. Her knowledge of grain mills, proteins, glutens, natural vitamins and minerals is amazing. Her practical bread-making technique and application is easy to follow and even a tough guy like me can make great bread. I'm not talking bread like some make from a pre-mixed bag of flour bought at the local market. I'm talking the bread that fills the house with that fresh baked smell one never forgets. The kind that causes you to drool waitng for the baking cycle to finish. The kind that begs for fresh butter and a hungry mouth. Thanks for this wonderful resource and congrats on creating the best book of it's kind since sliced bread !!! Pardon the pun, I couldn't resist.

My Magic Mill mixer has an optional grain grinder, and I've been curious about the idea of grinding my own flour. Yet, I know (with vast experience) that sometimes the add-on gizmos are junk; if you want to do the job right, buy the right tool. So I bought this book when I was buying other parts, and I needed to fill out the order to get free shipping.

I'm glad that I got the book, because it did help me make a decision. Perhaps the best part of this book is a chapter that enumerates grain mill sources (including Internet URLs) and evaluates each mill available. For instance, my add-on is described as having (among other attributes) "flour texture adequate but not superfine; offers many attachments including oat flaker, grater that handles nuts, and meat grinder that makes peanut butter."

So, if you're looking for help in making a decision about investing money in a grain mill, this book definitely will help. In my case, it saved me money. Now that I know the process of grinding, etc., I realize I probably won't bother with the attachment (at least not until my kitchen remodel is done and I have more storage space).

However, the book has a lot more information, which you may welcome or, like me, find a bit "much." The author spends several chapters explaining how grain is milled nowadays, the virtues of fiber, and an analysis of all the great nutrients to be found in whole grain bread. With *great* detail, but no pictures. I've been a health-food person for 20+ years; while she did a good job of imparting the information, there was little I didn't know and hey, I was sold on this stuff long ago. (If we don't make our own multi-grain bread, we buy it at a whole foods market.)

In addition to its health benefits, the author gives "self sufficiency" as another primary reason to mill your own grain. If this is something that's important to you, you probably already know it. For me, that's a ho-hum point. I already did my time living on an island off the coast of Maine, learning how to cook on a 100+-year-old wood stove. Its charm wore off after the tenth load of wood I had to bring in. I'm all for self-sufficiency, as long as I don't have to work up a sweat.

Anyway, the strength of this book is very much in the last half of the book, which explains how to choose a mill (electric? hand-cranked? a community mill?), the classes of wheat (I learned quite a bit in this section), and other grist for your mill (such as quinoa or rye). She even discusses the mundane details of how to store grain and deal with pests. There's a few recipes, but these are mainly guides for people new to whole-grain cooking.

The problem is an overload of information. I didn't need three or four chapters to explain why squishy white bread is bad and why fresh grain is better. If you're considering this book, you probably don't, either. Even though the information is well-intended and the author clearly believes what she's talking about, after a while, the explanations begin to sound like lectures ("Okay, mom, I HEAR YOU!"). I found it off-putting. The book could easily have been a (5 star) 75-page pamphlet instead of a 262 page book, and sell for a list price of $10 instead of $15.

But if you're interested in milling your own whole grain, don't let my criticisms stop you. I got exactly the information I needed, and I expect you will, too.

First, DO NOT be misled by the first few "good reviews" as I was...check them a bit closer and you will see these people tend to review exactly ONE book - this one. Unfortunately, I only went back after wondering why/how this book received such high rating...after reading it you will too. As others have pointed out, the book is about half "fluff" with the real content in the second half...unfortunately, that is woefully out of date even in the new release!


I was very disappointed in this book; while it does provide a solid overview of milling grain to create your own flour at home, a great deal of the information is VERY out of date....and this is in the NEWLY RELEASED 2009 version.

For example, several websites are out of business. Price quotes for some of the suggested grinders are double what is listed in the book for the exact same model (ie the Diamant is listed as sub $600 but in reality is over $1200 for the D525 model specified in the book) and in other cases the grain mill/company has changed names entirely. So much for "updating" the book (save your money and buy the used copies). Also, do a quick search as you can find the new version for 40% less than what it is selling for here.

It should also be noted, a great deal of the background information is available free online simply by performing a search. While it is interesting to note the difference in nutritional value, history of grains etc...readers should be aware that background info is 1/2 the entire book.

I was also VERY disheartened to see so many limitations on the actual coverage of such imperatives such as storing the grain- for example, how to determine if a grain may be contaminated with Ergot or other major health hazards...all issues I was expecting to encounter but did not.Once again, I learned more from an online search.

Likewise, grain resources were limited, out of date or much higher priced than those found via a search (paid placement perhaps?). I suspect there was minimal to no update.

Finally, in the resource section the author has a bad habit of making a listing then "see x section" for the actual resource. In some areas there is not one actual reference...only instructions to see a prior section...again, pure fluff and very annoying when trying to compare.

Bottom line - disappointing. Author should have actually updated the book plus added more resources and actually taken the time to repeat resources that may overlap into different categories. VERY SLOPPY. On the other hand, this is one of the few books about griding your own grain. As the new owner of a beautiful electric grain mill from Germany plus a manual model for beans etc (Country Living Grain Mill) I was hoping for much more.

I have been milling grain at home since the 70's. I didn't purchase this book with the thought that every page would be new information for me. Unlike a prior reviewer, how is an author to know how much information is enough or too much for each reader? I would prefer too much information; I can filter out what I know quite easily. This is an excellent primer for someone interested in, or just starting out in, whole grain work. I wish we'd had something like this back in the early seventies!

I have an employee who has approached me, interested in doing her own whole grain work. This was the book I have loaned her. Unlike a prior reviewer, please understand that this is not a cookbook in the conventional sense. It's more like a food science book on a specific field.

I am delighted to have this informative and well-written reference book on my shelf.

`flour power' by Marleeta F. Basey covers a much broader agenda than a coverage of grinding wheat for bread at home. While this book makes many, many good points, especially to an old style `Whole Earth Catalogue' hippie like myself, it starts of on the wrong foot with me with some exaggerations about the history of bread and milling grains at home.

Two early statements give a misleading notion of the history of bread and home milling, where the author gives us the sense that early agricultural households were baking baguettes in 3000 BC and that the majority of households were grinding their own flour up to the early 19th century when the industrial revolution took milling under its wing. On no less an authority than Elizabeth David in `English Bread and Yeast Cookery' and various authorities writing on French and Italian bread baking, I am sure that both grain milling and bread baking became very early specialities in development of civilization. In the ancient Roman world, especially, I know that both milling and bread baking were specialized crafts since home milling produced a product very inferior to what could be done with the great water driven mills and very few homes could afford to have an oven.

Fortunately, the value of this book is not in its historical perspective as it is in its two major agendas concerning the superior nutritional value of home ground wheat meal and the contribution to self sufficiency made by the use of a good home grain mill. I need to emphasize here that what home grain mills produce from wheat berries is NOT white all-purpose flour. This point needs to be made clearly to be sure you do not anticipate being able to buy this book to find an alternative source to your handy blue and white bag of King Arthur unbleached bread flour. In fact, one of the two points of the book is that wheat meal is nutritionally far superior to King Arthur's finest white or whole-wheat flour. The author goes to great lengths to be clear on the point that a modern mechanical process that simply cannot be reproduced by a home machine produces white flour. One result of this situation is that your beautiful, freshly milled wheat meal may simply not work in your favorite Peter Reinhart or Rose Levy Beranbaum or Peter Ortiz recipes. They will certainly not produce the classic Italian and French loaves from Parisian batards to Foccacia, let alone egg breads or holiday specialities like brioche, paska, or panettone.

This book is assuming that you are reading it for material for a fairly basic lifestyle change. It is not for nothing that the author is recommending you consider a home mill which can be operated both manually and with electricity. It is also no accident that the author tells us of ways to buy and store up to a year's supply of grain for milling. Ms. Basey is every bit the reincarnation of the hippies we see in the second reel of the movie `Easy Rider' who embrace a lifestyle where they grow their own grain and presumably have the means of milling it themselves, which, if it is corn, is not too far fetched as the Indians in their southwestern terroir still hand mill their corn. But that doesn't work if you live in Saddle Brook, NJ or even Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which brings to mind the question of why there are no references to the Amish in this book, but that is an entirely incidental issue. My last word on the survivalist aspect of this book is that a hand cranked mill may not be much good if you install the gizmo in your basement and the power goes out. A more likely scenario is that you will have a gas powered generator to run your hand mill and provide power for your laptop computer and the oven needed to bake your bread.

The two most important issues in the book are the major nutritional advantages of wheat meal and the selection of the best home mill to meet your needs, which may go far beyond the simple ability to turn wheat berries into flour. A device that can grind hard foodstuffs into a powder or paste has immense utility in processing the whole range of food grains including corn, barley, dried beans, nuts, and seeds. The problem here is that not every device sold as a home wheat mill will handle oily nuts and seeds and do a credible job of producing nut butters.

Getting back to bread, part of Ms. Basey's case is based on the ease with which bread can be made in modern bread machines. Unfortunately, I can't offer an opinion on this aspect, as I am have never used a bread machine and suspect that even the best bread machines are incapable of reproducing truly good artisinal or speciality breads, so I'll stick with my KitchenAid and Kenmore oven. She also does not address the situation about what to do with your bread machine when the power goes out.

All in all, this book is a lot of fun to read and to fantasize about what the neoprimitive life would be like with your basement stocked with bags of wheat, rice, oats, and corn, bunkering your bench on which your grain mill sits in anticipation of that long anticipated weekend when you really get down to grind some flour. It's biggest problem is that while it gives us everything we need to evaluate mills ourselves, it doesn't stick its neck out to evaluate and recommend the models made by the manufacturers we can access by phone, mail, or internet.

Like good books on pickling, cheese making, and tofu making, this is a fun book to read, even if you have no intentions of ever buying one of these gizmos. It may even succeed in talking you out of doing it.

FLOUR POWER in its revised new edition remains the ONLY comprehensive guide on the market to home flour milling - and therefore remains a top pick for any serious home or public library cookbook collection seeking a strong representation of whole-grain cookbooks. Almost all commercial flours have lost fiber and minerals from processing - but home millers have a unique opportunity to retain these lost food values. FLOUR POWER: A GUIDE TO MODERN HOME GRAIN MILLING covers everything; from equipment needed to stone grinding, obtaining the best grains to mill, stocking the home granary and much more. A top pick - and a 'must' for any serious whole foods cook.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

I'm glad that the book will be back in print. It's been a real blessing for me. I've purchased many different types of grain online and have been treating my family (and extended families) to wonderful breads and other baked items. I made stew and put in some crumbs from the whole wheat bread that I made to thicken the soup. It did a wonderful job and I feel good about using the whole grains another way. Check out this book if you want to eat/live better.

I found this book to be excellent. Having already purchased a grain mill, I was curious to see if I would have have made the same buying conclusion after her reviews, and could see that I made the right decision for my needs. I grind oats and soft wheat very coarsely for breakfast muesli every day, yet need ultra-fine flour for my breads.
Although I knew much of what was covered, it filled in several areas of understanding. An important thing I learned was that some whole grains--notably rye and brown rice--do not keep 'forever' like wheat does, which was quite a revelation and altered my grain-buying plans.