Flour Power: A Guide To Modern Home Grain Milling
by Marleeta F. Basey
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marleeta F. BaseyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-05-15
ISBN: 0970540116
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Jermar Press
Book Reviews of Flour Power: A Guide To Modern Home Grain Milling
Book Review: A very informative book on milling technology and home milling.
Summary: 4 Stars
`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.
Summary of Flour Power: A Guide To Modern Home Grain Milling
The only book written on modern home grain milling. This book manages to present a technical topic in a fascinating and entertaining way. Unusually detailed and littered with historical tidbits. Includes mill selection criteria, an education on bread wheats, secrets for making deliciously light whole meal breads, and purchasing contacts for dozens of grain mills, plus oat rollers and bread wheats.Rice & Grains Books
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