When you mill single variety flours you have the advantage of baking with a wonderful range of grains and you can normally trace these back to the farm, building a connection between what you eat and where it is produced. The flavour impact is also extraordinary.
However, when you buy flour from the mill or a store you are buying the experience of the miller who has blended the grains to produce a flour that has consistency and will perform reliably.
Using single variety grains and milling them fresh highlights the differences that each grain has. It will have a different protein amount, hagberg falling number and specific weight. All of these differences will mean that the flour needs more or less water, will need more or fewer folds to develop the gluten etc. In the video below I show you the difference between two single variety grains to show you just how different they can be when working a dough.
When using fresh milled flour you might need to adjust the way you develop the dough each time you buy new grains. My top tip for this is to start with a standard amount of water, say 300g water to 500g flour and then add a little more as you mix the dough, measuring each addition. Keep a record of this in a notebook, changing only one variable every time you bake. This will hep you work out how this batch of grain performs.
