Whole Wheat Flour Blend for the Best Bread

A Whole Wheat Flour Blend for Superior Baking and Optimal Nutrition

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Making a whole wheat flour blend from an array of grains helps to boost the nutritional value of your baking. It also gives you the best function. When I first started baking whole wheat bread at home, I had no idea how complicated the world of whole grains could be! From ancient grains to cereal grains, to gluten-free, it can be intimidating but also so interesting. The flour that many of us bake with has become so one-dimensional, but it doesn’t have to be! In this post we will discuss the advantages of using different grains in your baking. I will also go over the simple blend I create and use in my home to get the best flavor, nutrition, and bake.

Goals of using a Whole Wheat Flour Blend

When I first started playing with the idea of combining grains, I definitely had specific guidelines for what I hoped to gain from the final product. First, I did hope to increase the nutritional value of what I was feeding my family. When you start looking into the different nutrients that are found in different wheat varieties, if you’re like me you start to think, how great would it be to get a little bit of all of that!

As someone who has been taking prenatal vitamins for about six years now, I was amazed to discover that so many whole wheat flours are packed with things that our bodies are often lacking, such as iron, zinc, folate, etc. In this day and age, we tend to look at grains as empty calories because white flour has had many of these nutrients removed. When a wheat berry is first ground into flour, it has three parts: the endosperm, the germ, and the bran. To make white flour, the germ and the bran are removed taking with them a rich supply of nutrients and the majority of the fiber.

But whole grains can be such an important part of a well-rounded diet, and different types of grain have their own strengths and weaknesses. Choosing to only use one would be like deciding that you were only going to eat one type of vegetable for the rest of your life!

Better Baking with Whole Wheat Flour Blends

In addition to having their own nutritional advantages, different varieties of grains have different flavor profiles that can really add depth to your baking. For example, I love using Kamut flour in my bread because it has an almost buttery flavor that prevents my bread from tasting overly “wheaty”. Rye flour has a distinct taste that many of us are familiar with, and I love using a little bit in my breads.

Perhaps the most important distinction between grains in terms of baking is the varying gluten strength of each variety. Some offer great gluten structure and make amazing bread. Others are packed with nutrients but are not suitable for baking good bread on their own. By combining grains, you really get the best of both worlds and can end up with a product that tastes so good and bakes up perfectly!

What I Put in my Whole Wheat Flour Blend

Rye

I love using rye flour in my bread and other baked goods because it is extremely nutritious. Of all the grains that I use, rye has the most fiber which is so good for our gut health. However, it does contain significantly less gluten than wheat flour which can cause your bread to be dense and dry. Using a small amount of it, maybe 10%, is the perfect way to get some of the benefits into your diet without sacrificing with your baking.

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Spelt

Spelt flour is an ancient grain with a sweet and nutty flavor. It is a great flour to use in pastries such as scones or even chocolate chip cookies, but the gluten found in spelt is very fragile and not ideal for bread baking when it’s used by itself. I use 10% in my blend.

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Kamut

I think this is my favorite grain to bake with. Kamut is an ancient grain that is grown in the United States and has a wonderful, buttery flavor and a golden yellow color. It is high in manganese which can increase brain health. The high protein content makes it ideal for bread baking and, better yet, many people with gluten intolerance have found this grain easier to digest. I like to use 20% in my blend.

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Hard White Wheat

This is the most accessible and affordable grain and probably what we are all most familiar with. Wheat flours found in the store are often made from hard white wheat. It is high in fiber and protein, and has a strong gluten content making it great for bread baking. If you are having trouble tolerating commercial grains and would like to stick with only ancient grains, you could easily replace this with Kamut flour. I typically use hard white wheat as the base of my wheat blend because it is the most economical option, and I use about 50%.

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Quinoa

A cereal grain, quinoa is awesome because it is a complete protein meaning it contains all nine essential amino acids that we need in our diet. It does not contain gluten, making it a poor option for baking, but being able to throw it in to a grain blend is a perfect option. It also boasts a high level of antioxidants which is always a plus! I use 10% in my blend.

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Dried Edible Flowers

This is totally optional, but I love incorporating a sprinkle of fresh, dried flowers into my whole wheat blend! Not only are they beautiful and fun to use, but many dried edible flowers also contain antioxidants and have anti-inflammatory properties.

I like to make and store enough flour for a week’s worth of baking. Once a week, usually on bread baking day, I refill a glass canister with my components. For example, I might start with 5 cups of Hard White Wheat and add in 2 cups of Kamut and 1 cup each of Quinoa, Rye, and Spelt. Then, I sprinkle in the edible flowers and mix it all together. This works for ground flour as well as whole wheat berries that haven’t yet been milled.

Using Your Whole Wheat Flour Blend

When you bake with your whole wheat flour blend, simply replace an amount of flour with the blend. The combo of grain varieties makes it suitable for everything from hearty breads to delicate scones. If you were previously using any type of whole wheat flour for a recipe, your new blend with work perfectly!

It’s important to know that whole grains will always behave differently than white flour. So for me, the goal is not to try to make my bread taste like white bread, but to learn to love and embrace the complex flavor and fuller texture of whole wheat flour. Whole wheat bread is denser and has a heavier crumb, so don’t be discouraged if your bread doesn’t look like the fluffy white sandwich bread that you see in the store.

If you are switching from white flour, I recommend starting small! Maybe switch out 10% of the white flour for your whole wheat blend and go from there, adding a little more each time! Keep in mind that whole wheat flour contains 100% of the white flour. What does this mean? It means that there is nothing intrinsically bad about white flour, it’s just lacking. When we reintroduce even small amounts of whole grains, we are adding back many of the nutrients that have been stripped from white flour and balancing the glycemic index a bit.

Above all, you want your family to love what you’re making or you’re not going to stick with it! No matter the latest opinions on what we should or should not be eating, cooking from scratch is never trendy and is always the healthiest option. So if switching to 100% whole wheat baked goods is more than your family’s palette can handle, that’s okay! Know that just adding a bit more fiber and nutrients from whole wheat flour is a victory. Start small and you can increase the amount you use as your tastes allow!

Discovering the NutriMill

I remember when my mom first came home and told us she was going to buy a grain mill. She had five kids who were consuming a huge amount of sandwich bread and she, like me, was starting to feel like there was a large nutritional gap in our diet. Looking for an answer, she became fast friends with a woman who taught her to make sandwich bread in bulk amounts, six loaves at a time, with freshly ground wheat berries.

Now, twenty years later, she still pulls out her NutriMill every few weeks to make the same recipe. Milling flour became a way of life for her because of the huge impact it had on the way our family ate and thought about food. Discovering that I could make something as wholesome and functional as homemade pasta from fresh milled flour has had a similar impact on my growing family, and I will never go back!

What’s so great about Fresh Milled Flour?

The most obvious but important reason to bake with fresh milled flour is that you know exactly what you’re getting. When using a home mill, you take the whole wheat berry and mill a fine flour that retains every component. Grains in their complete form contain many vital nutrients as well as fiber for belly health.

When you purchase white flour from the store, the bran and germ of the wheat kernels have been removed taking much of the fiber and nutrients with them. Even whole wheat flour is often made by taking white flour and adding bran back in. During the commercial milling process, the oil that is found within the wheat berry is removed in order to extend the shelf life of the flour. Often preservatives are used as well. Just like with anything you make from scratch, there’s security in knowing how food is created from start to finish and milling your own flour gives you this knowledge.

Additionally, fresh milled flour has a complex flavor profile that’s a little sweeter and a little nuttier than the grains you find on a store shelf. Compare freshly ground wheat berries to coffee beans and you start to understand how time can make them a little stale. For the best flavor, it’s best to use milled wheat within 3 days but it can last on a shelf for 7-10 days.

Grinding your Fresh Flour

For me, the number one reason to grind my own flour is that I can control how fine to grind the wheat berries. Commercial wheat flour tends to be very course and the large pieces of bran make it more difficult for gluten to develop in a loaf of bread. Finely ground flour is best for smooth pasta noodles that hold their shape when boiled and twirl round and round a fork! For flavor, texture, and nutrition, grinding your own wheat is far superior!

Purchasing a wheat mill is a bit of an investment and it’s not something you will likely do on a whim. You have to believe that this is the next step in your family’s food journey. I have had my Nutrimill for about ten years now and I have always loved making bread with freshly ground flour, but when it really became dear to me was when I realized I could be utilizing the flour for so many other things! I try to keep a couple of days’ worth in my pantry at all times so that I can easily use it for pancakes, flat breads, etc. Feeding your family with whole grains does not have to be a long process. Once you start grinding fresh flour you will start finding so many ways to use it!

I recently upgraded to THIS NutriMill Harvest. I love keeping it easily accessible on my counter and it’s so pretty!

Purchasing Whole Grains

To create your own whole wheat flour blend, you can purchase grain as either berries or ground flour. One advantage of buying berries is that I can purchaser 25 pound bags of each variety, store them in a bucket with an airtight lid, and know that they will last indefinitely. Then, whenever I need flour, I measure out the correct amount of each type into a big bowl, give it a stir, and pour them into my grain mill where they are ground into flour.

Dried edible flowers can come from a variety of sources including your back yard! They are so easy to find on amazon, just look for dried edible flowers for teas. You can either mill the flowers with your wheat berries or, for a more pronounced effect, fold them into your flour after it’s ground. Depending on what you choose, some flowers can give your bread a slightly floral scent but otherwise have very little effect on the overall taste of your finished product.

Alternately, if you would like to buy and use pre-ground flour, you may want to stick with smaller amounts or keep the extra in a freezer as whole wheat flour has a much shorter shelf life than white flour. Mixing your grain blend using ground flour is so simple! I would take a large mixing bowl and measure out each flour. Use a whisk to stir the components together, making sure they are evenly distributed. I think you’ll be amazed at how colorful a bowl of flour can be! Sprinkle your dried edible flowers in and give it all a final stir, then start putting it to good use!