The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: Complete Guide to Whole-Grain Bread Baking - Perfect for Homemade Artisan Loaves, Healthy Family Meals & Gift-Giving

I've been researching baking whole-grain breads with fresh home-milled flours for several months. It's easy to go into information overload. There are dozens of helpful Web sites and discussion forums, but it's a lot of work to sift through the useless commentary. I wish people who had nothing more to offer than "I baked a brick so this is stupid" and "white flour won't kill you lol" would refrain from commenting. I'm an experienced bread and pastry baker, but after wading through all the crazy stuff I was getting a bit freaked out, and starting to believe that baking with fresh whole-grain flour was going to be difficult. Fortunately, it's not. This book is the real deal, all about baking breads with whole-grain flours, with nary a speck of white flour in sight.I purchased a Komo Classic grain mill. I was leaning towards a Nutrimill or Wondermill, but even though the Komo costs a lot more, it's more versatile. It grinds from very fine to very coarse, so I can make pastries, breads, and cracked-grain cereals. It is beautiful in appearance, and it's very clean-- you don't have to be careful to not spray flour all over.If you are new to bread baking, read the first chapters up to "Questions and Answers." Read them several times. There is a wealth of fundamental instruction in these chapters. Then for your first try do "A Loaf for Learning." Take your time and study the book carefully, because baking bread isn't a precise process where you do everything the exact same way each time, with precisely-measured ingredients and precise time measurements for each step. You have to learn how to evaluate the condition of your dough, allow for varying flour quality, different ambient temperatures and humidity, and many other factors. Lauren teaches you how to do all this. She also teaches the basic science of bread baking, so as you gain experience you'll know how to adjust certain variables for the results you want, like chewier, softer, sweeter, less sweet, coarser, finer, and so on. You need to know these things for any kind of bread baking, and it's even more essential when you mill your own flour because it's going to be less consistent than commercial refined processed white flours. The moisture, fat, and protein content of your whole grains are going to be different depending on where you bought them, how they were stored, and their growing conditions.As Laurel says in the Basic Whole Wheat Bread recipe, proper kneading is the key to a great loaf of bread. Kitchen counters are too high for most people to knead comfortably. So find something to stand on for that extra couple inches of leverage. Or use a good stout mixer made for kneading bread dough like a KitchenAid or Bosch.Does this all sound a little scary? It isn't, really, once you get into it. Bread baking is great fun, and baking with your own fresh home-milled flours ensures you'll get great loaves with maximum nutritional value and flavor. I grind just what I need per use, because grains lose their nutritional value quickly after milling. If you don't have a good local source of whole grains to mill there are plenty of mail-order sources like Azure, Pleasant Hill Grains, and Montana Wheat, but I'll wager your local grocery or natural-foods store will special-order for you, which should save some shipping costs."white flour won't kill you lol" True, it won't, not instantly anyway. Sub-par nutrition takes it toll in a thousand subtle ways: over- or underweight, less energy, more susceptibility to illness and physical ailments. Nutrition is fundamental to health (duh!) I pay a little more for certified organic grains because how we grow our food also pertains to health-- healthy planet = healthy people. I feel silly saying these things because they are blindingly obvious, but in these fun modern times there is a backlash to the blindingly obvious.