Is Fresh-Milled Flour Actually Harder to Bake With?

Yeah. A little.

Don’t get me wrong, fresh-milled flour isn’t some impossible creature you need a degree to understand. It’s harder because almost everything you already know about baking came from using commercial flour, and fresh-milled flour does not behave the way commercial flour taught you to expect.

You’re gonna mix a dough and think it’s too wet. Then you’re gonna let it sit and wonder where half the water went.

You’re gonna make bread that rises beautifully one day and then make what feels like the exact same thing three days later and stare at it wondering what you did to offend it.

And somebody on Facebook is going to tell you to add more flour. Somebody else is going to tell you to add more water. Somebody will tell you it needs vital wheat gluten. Another will tell you to knead it until you can read the newspaper through the windowpane. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you’re gonna wonder why you spent several hundred dollars to make your life harder.

The problem usually isn’t that fresh-milled flour is harder. You just don’t know it yet. You don’t know what YOUR flour feels like when it has enough water. You don’t know how long flour from YOUR mill needs to sit before you decide the dough is too wet or too dry. You don’t know what hard white feels like compared with soft white, or what happens when you switch grains. You haven’t had enough dough under your hands yet to recognize when something is actually wrong and when you just need to leave it alone for ten minutes.

That part takes time. But eventually something funny happens. You stop staring at the recipe every thirty seconds. You stop panicking because somebody else’s dough looked different. You put your hands on yours and know what it needs.

And then fresh-milled flour quits feeling harder.

It just becomes the flour you bake with.