Why FMF Doesn’t Follow White-Flour Rules

So... you thought coming over here to the FMF life was just gonna be all, “mill your grain and have homemade flour,” huh?

Tell me, how well’d that work out for ya?

Did it spank ya? It’s okay... it spanked the whole lot of us.

We thought, “Oh, I just mill these berries into flour and use Betty Crocker’s bread recipe.”

Yeah.

That worked...

for a whole five seconds. 😆

Then your dough got sticky, your loaf came out dense or falling apart, and every rule you thought you understood packed a little suitcase and left town.

That’s fresh-milled flour.

Same basic ingredients.

Completely different attitude.

You see, what they never told you is… all those beautiful pieces of the flour you retain from milling? Sure, WONDERFUL for nutrition… absolute terrorists in dough if you don’t understand them.

You’ve got bran… that little snot goes around PURPOSELY slicing through every little strand of gluten it can get its hands on before you put it in the oven if you don’t make it’s arms jelly first. Then along comes little enzymes that I swear learned from two year old’s that Red Bull gives you wings! And then you gonna add those wildly crazy yeasts in there?

Dude! Have you never SEEN Gremlins?!?!?! You just reenacted the ENTIRE movie in a mixing bowl! White flour is over there like “I have no idea why you chose chaos, but I will NEVER act like that!” FMF is swinging from the chandelier like Stitch.

That last sentence have you scratching your head? It should. Because it makes as much sense as people trying to make an active living ecosystem act like a dead inanimate object.

“Active living ecosystem” ? But Pamela, I thought we were talking about flour? We ARE! So what am I saying in practical terms?—water keeps moving, bran keeps interfering, enzymes keep working, yeast keeps fermenting, gluten keeps developing/changing—so of course a clock and somebody’s sacred hydration number can’t boss the whole bowl around. And if you try to make it, you’re going to get humbled real quick.

With FMF, the bran needs to be softened by hydration. Giving those little enzymes their sippy cups full of water will also bring them down off that Red Bull so that we at LEAST have everybody in the same room instead of running through the house with scissors. then the whole flour can calm down and organize itself before you start throwing more chaos into the bowl. Which leads us right into Autolyse. Ahhhh… that famous fancy word that literally means soak the flour.

Fresh-milled flour is not white flour with a tan.

It showed up with the bran, the germ, the oils, the enzymes, the whole loud family reunion.

So when your old bread rules suddenly start acting suspicious, don’t panic.

Your flour changed.

Your dough changed.

And now you get to learn what this one does.

If you want the deeper lessons, they’re in Stop… Just Stop. Fresh-Milled Flour Doesn’t Follow Rules.

If you want the recipes, they’re over in Going Grains Full Access.