Thinking of milling my own grain, input needed?

For the past year I have been playing with the idea of knowing my own grain, for the purposes of bread baking and whatnot. In the past couple of months I have noticed that Amazon has begun carrying food in my area, and one of those items is wheat berries that can be ground into flour at 25 to 50 pounds a bag. I crunched the numbers and found that it be roughly 2 dollars more for every 5 pounds, however considering that the product says that is organic and then GM code I would not be adverse to paying the two dollar addition. I'm curious if anyone else has thought about milling their own grain, and if they could give me any input as to how they go about doing it, what tools they would recommend, and any adjustments to bread recipes that have to be taken into account when using fresh milk flour. I typically use recipes that require all-purpose flour, bread flour, and sourdough starters. What sort of adjustments would I have to make to those particular types of recipes? Could I get a good sourdough starter going from fresh milk grain? Could I simply take this culture from my already established starter put a little bit in a new batch and would it carry over? What is the overall quality and taste of fresh milk flour? Is it superior to store-bought flowers? What methods of storage for the green berries are recommended? Created an iPhone, please forgive grammar issues

We've milled our own flour for quite some time now. However we get our wheat from our local MFA and it isn't considered cleaned. We get a few beetles, stems, and occasionally a few pieces of corn in it. This year it cost us right around ten bucks for a fifty pound bag. The price can change yearly as the harvest changes and supply gets lower. It is soft white wheat that is sold at MFA exchanges, not hard red.

If you get a flour mill make sure to get an electric one unless you want to look like Popeye in a few months. Make sure it's an actual flour mill and not a simple grinder. Many places online will list a grinder as a mill. A mill has stones. A grinder is just two metal plates. Electric mills can be very noisy but will save you from wearing out your arms.

You can add some from your sourdough starter and it should work just fine. You can also start a new batch from scratch with just the ground wheat. Be aware that when making your own flour from wheat it's considered wheat bread, not white.

We make biscuits on a regular basis using half milled and half white from the store. The home milled flour gives them a great flavor.

It's very difficult to mill grain consistently, especially in the small quantities you would use. You would need a set of flat plates, preferably made from stone. You would need a way to suspend one stone over the other in a stable way that allows very small incremental adjustments (to adjust your grain and your grind) and that would very, very close to one another. You would need a source of energy to spin the plates, and a way to collect the ground grain. This would be very hard to set up on your own. You could probably buy a mill, but I'm sure it would be very expensive, and quite large.

I suppose you could grind very small amounts of flour in a good food processor, but it would go from course flour to fine flour to unusable mush very quickly, and would take quite a bit of practice to get right. And you definitely will not get a consistent grind this way. I've used a Bullet-type mini-blender to grind small amounts of oats and wheat to add to regular flour when making rustic loaves, but I've never done it in quantities over a cup at a a time.

You should store your grain in a cool, dark place that gets plenty of air circulation. It won't last forever, so 50 pounds of wheat berries or oat groats is likely too much at a time, unless you do a huge amount of baking.

Expect that your flour will be coarse and inconsitent in grind. This will make rustic loaves, not even, soft, finely-grained ones, and not pleasing desserts. Also, whole wheat has less gluten in it than refined all-purpose flour and far less than bread flour. Unless you add gluten to your recipes, you will have flat, dense breads.

I'm all for making food from scratch (I make my own butter, cheese and sausage), but I've never seen that milling my own flour was practical. You can easily get good, fresh, organic milled flour.