A thing or two about “flour”

I don’t really know about most of you, but until recently, I have not really questioned where flour comes from. I knew that when people generally spoke of flour, they usually were referring to wheat flour. So really I knew that it had wheat involved in the process. But I had assumed that the wheat had to go through some fancy schmancy extraction process. However, as it turns out it actually was just beat up until it got really really tiny. Take note from that source that wheat often times is also bleached… yuck X(.

Flour doesn’t have to come from wheat

As we have seen as of the last 20 some years, there has been a trend in people who are needing to go gluten free. While some would argue that the reasoning for this shift is obvious that gluten is just not meant for human consumption, I think it is a little bit more complicated than that. But that is for another article. Non the less, lets take what I said earlier into consideration. That when making wheat flour it is just wheat grains that have been beaten up until it got really small. This clearly leads one to believe that they can make flour out of any grain they choose. Some of these grains include, but are not limited to, rice, sorghum, teff, amaranthe, and the list goes on. This list can also include beans and other legumes. Pretty neat huh?

These flours are kind of hard to find

Often times when people find themselves having to go gluten free, they find themselves getting discouraged quickly because it seems that these alternative flours are too hard to find, or are just too expensive to justify purchasing. Often times I have found myself scrounging around health food stores such as whole foods or natural grocers for hours thinking that I just failed to spot some rice flour on the shelf. These types of pursuits results in the individuals either giving up on their dreams of gluten free baking, or they just buy the cheap (and often bleached X( ) wheat flour, and just stomach their way through the intestinal distress. Something that my wife and I eventually figured out though was something like “man rice flour is really hard to find but rice isn’t… what if we just bought some rice, and beat it up until it got really tiny?” And thats what we did.

But how do you do it

We got ourselves a grain mill… this grain mill to be exact. this particular 100$ VKP household grainmill is super compact, super low maintentance, and (when paired with the 60$ electric motor addon) super easy and awesome to use.
Yes, it really is that simple, and boy was it the one of the greatest things we have ever done. not only did it cut down on our shopping time, it also cut out significantly on our grocery bill. lets do a quick price break down. For this we will break down the cost of two products that can be found at a whole foods.

Cost Breakdown

(this breakdown is representative of the prices as of writing this article in March of 2022)

32 of shortgrain brown rice about 1.07$ per cup 24 oz brown rice flour about 1.57$ per cup We can clearly see that the price per cup of brown rice is about 50 cents cheaper than the equivalent amount of brown rice flour (for full consideration, keep in mind that these products are NOT OF THE SAME BRAND so the direct cost analysis might be a bit bumpy). Something we have not yet considered though When brown rice get ground up into brown rice flour, 1 cup of rice becomes about 1.875 cups of brown rice flour (at least when it comes out of the grain mill that we are discussing in this article). So, if we take that conversion into consideration. The cost of the brown rice flour that one would theoretically mill themselves, now becomes about 0.57$ per cup!!! that is about 1 whole dollar cheaper per cup in comparison to the brown rice flour B). That means it would take about 85.5 cups(22 bags) of rice for the mill to pay for itself. How cool is that!?!?! not only is this mathmatically cheaper using these particular prices, but you should also consider that bulk bags of rice can be easily found in most stores.

Conclusion

After wasting hours rummaging through health food stores in search of non wheat based flours, happening upon small household grain mills might have been one of the best things my family could have happened upon for our kitchen as we have found it saves us lots of time and money when it comes to acquiring rice, sorghum, teff, and all kinds of other flours.