Do I Need Vital Wheat Gluten in Fresh-Milled Flour Bread?

No.

If you are milling a strong bread wheat, your flour already contains the proteins needed to build gluten. Hard white and hard red wheat can both make tall, soft, beautifully structured bread without adding vital wheat gluten, dough conditioners, lecithin, gums, or anything else designed to make the flour act differently.

When a fresh-milled loaf comes out dense, weak, or disappointing, adding more gluten does not explain what went wrong. Grain choice, grind size, hydration, rest, mixing, fermentation, shaping, and dough weight all deserve attention first.

Vital wheat gluten can make a weak dough appear stronger, but covering a problem is not the same as understanding it. If the loaf only works after extra protein gets dumped into the bowl, you still do not know why the original flour failed to perform.

And I am not interested in teaching people how to mill whole grain at home only to start rebuilding commercial flour one additive at a time.

Fresh-milled flour has everything it came from the field with. Learn how to work with it.

If you chose the wrong grain for the job, choose a better grain. If the dough needs more development, learn how to develop it. If hydration is wrong, fix hydration. If fermentation went sideways, fix fermentation.

Do not throw an additive at every loaf and call the problem solved.

Stop... Just Stop. Fresh-Milled Flour Doesn’t Follow Rules goes much deeper into gluten development, grain strength, hydration, and why fresh-milled dough often gets blamed for problems created somewhere else in the process.

You bought a grain mill to learn flour.

Learn the flour.