The Story Behind Going Grains
Who We Are:
Hi! I’m Pamela Wilday. I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains with the kind of upbringing where you learned to can, make do, figure things out, and not waste much. A lot of that came from my grandmother, and a lot of it stuck.
In 2009, I married the love of my life. We raised four kids while working nonstop, and for years my husband and I have drove semi truck to make ends meet, switching on and off often enough that our youngest daughter still had time with both of us.
I still drive professionally for Prime, Inc. and am so very grateful and have been fortunate to be recognized within the trucking industry for my work and involvement in the industry.
Once the kids were grown, we started looking a whole lot harder at how we wanted to live. I wanted to get back to the kind of food I understood, become more reliant on YHVH for provision, and learn to make more of what we used ourselves.
That eventually led us to home milling. I thought I was just going to grind wheat and make bread, but it didn’t take long before I started noticing that fresh-milled flour did not always behave the way people said it should. And if you know me at all, you already know I wasn’t about to leave it there.
How Going Grains Started
I started asking questions but no one could give me answers. If they did, they gave me “rules” to follow that were so out dated, no one even challenged them anymore. Well, the “me” in me wasn’t going to allow “rules” to be acceptable, when they weren’t actually working. So, I started researching more, experimenting more, and as time went by, I realized different kitchens can debunk different “rules” real fast.
A whole lot of Going Grains has probably been born somewhere between mile markers. Too much windshield time gives a person plenty of time to question things, and apparently I use mine to wonder why flour, dough, and bread do what they do. Going Grains grew right alongside my life on the road, not after it.
So I started sharing what I was learning, other people started testing right along with me, and Going Grains grew from there. There was never some grand plan to build a brand. I just wanted to understand why things happened the way they did, and it turned out a whole bunch of other people wanted the same thing. So thus Going Grains Facebook group was born.
How We’re Different
Going Grains is built around understanding, not memorizing. We don’t teach fresh-milled flour by handing people a rigid list of rules and expecting every kitchen, every mill, and every bag of grain to behave the same way. We test, compare, observe, and ask why. Sometimes traditional advice holds up, and sometimes it falls apart the minute real people try it in real kitchens.
The goal has never been to make people dependent on Going Grains for every answer. It’s to help them understand their flour and dough well enough to recognize what they’re seeing, make adjustments with confidence, and eventually teach someone else what they’ve learned.