This easy freshly milled bread recipe will be your new daily staple! You won’t believe this is a health food! To learn more about why this soft, sweet and delicious loaf is a health food, you can visit my post on the benefits of Freshly Milled flour here.

Making bread from freshly milled whole grains may seem intimidating, but it isn’t! Here are a few things that will be helpful to understand if you are first starting out.

Wheat Berries: Hard Wheat and Soft Wheat

There are many different types of wheat. All you need to understand is that hard wheat is for bread making and soft wheat is for cakes, cookies, muffins, biscuits, pancakes, scones etc.

Hard Wheat has a higher protein content (typically 12-15%), which gives it more gluten-forming potential.

Soft Wheat has a lower protein content (around 8-11%) and forms less gluten when mixed with water, resulting in a tender texture.

Have you ever seen “dont over mix” in a biscuit or scone recipe? Well, that is because all purpose white flour usually comes from Hard Wheat and if you over mix the batter, it will form gluten and not be crumbly like a biscuit or cake should be! Sooooo, no need to worry about over mixing as much if you plan on using freshly milled soft wheat in your cakes and cookie recipes! Using whole grains and milled when needed offers you so much freedom! Not only is it more easily digested and gives you 40 of the 44 nutrients your body needs everyday, it makes baking easier!!

Red vs White

There is hard white wheat and hard red wheat. Both are great. Hard red has a more nutty flavor and slightly more fiber and hard white has a milder flavor, still with lots of fiber – just not as much as red.

Soft wheat also has red and white! Soft red and soft white. Red being more nutty flavor and white being more mild.

I personally love Hard white wheat for my bread and because I like to play around with flavor, I love adding other wheat like spelt or Khorasan just to make it special. But you could use 100% hard red or 100% hard white and still get a wonderful bread loaf!

For my cakes and cookies and such I love soft white. So far I have only used soft white for these things. I’ll update as I contunite to experiment.

*Spelt and Khorasan are ancient grains which means they have been grown for thousands of years with little alteration compared to modern wheat varieties. It’s important to know that Modern wheat varieties are not GMO’s though! *

Isn’t American Wheat … Not Wheat Anymore?

The common argument today is that wheat in America…. isn’t actually wheat anymore. Ive learned this is not true! The issue in America is our flour! We aren’t actually eating wheat y’all, we are eating endosperm….. from a wheat grain. That’s it. It’s ONE small part of the wheat grain. If fact, technically the endosperm is made of GLUTEN and PROTEIN only. You will be thrilled to know that modern wheat today is not the culprit and it is NOT genetically modified.

Modern wheat has been through selective breeding which is a conventional method of breeding plants or animals with desirable traits. In the case of dwarf wheat, (which is most common today) breeders were aiming to develop a wheat variety that was more resistant to lodging (when tall plants fall over due to wind or rain) and could produce higher yields. By selecting and propagating the plants with desirable short stems, breeders were able to create wheat plants that were shorter, sturdier, and produced more grain.

The breeding process involved crossing different wheat varieties with naturally shorter (dwarf) varieties, or sometimes selecting plants with shorter stalks from existing wheat populations. Wheat is not our enemy. The sifting of the flour and the belief that we didn’t need our own mills…. those are the enemies. We need whole grains. Wheat is good.

What You’ll Need For This Easy Freshly Milled Bread Recipe:

Wheat: Hard white wheat or hard red wheat are great options when starting out. I also love adding half hard white with half spelt or kamut berries. I started out by ordering my wheat on Amazon but really is cheaper if you buy it from Azure Standard!

Extra Virgin Olive Oil: Oil makes this easy freshly milled bread recipe very soft and amazing.

Honey: This is also the key to making soft and amazing bread…not to mention sweet!

Sunflower Lecithin: A natural emulsifier that helps blend the ingredients together and makes the bread super soft. Unlike soy lecithin, sunflower lecithin is extracted using a chemical-free process (typically cold pressing or using water). This is great for those of us avoiding GMO’s and allergens. It is rich in phospholipids, which support brain health, liver function, and cellular repair. I buy it from Amazon here.

Commercial Yeast: Im learning that when using whole grains and milling your own flour, commercial yeast isn’t bad! Im so used to hearing its terrible for you but really what’s been terrible is the dead, only-one-part-of-the-grain “flour” that has a shelf life of forever…. ! Talk about stepping into freedom!! I like to use instaferm.

Sea Salt: My choice is Himalayan Sea Salt because it tastes great, has all the original nutrients and…. we can get it in bulk at Costco!

Warm Water: Filtered water is best but tap will work too.

Helpful Tips

Making bread really is very simple. I think we stress ourselves out when we try to make bread perfect. Making beautiful bread is a skill…so when starting out, who cares if it’s pretty? Your entire family devour freshly made bread – even if it’s ugly! So just start mixing your ingredients and worry about making it pretty later!

Some tips for you as you get started are these:

While you are milling the wheat into a bowl, start adding your wet ingredients to your stand mixer’s bowl and mix thoroughly. Adding the wet ingredients to the bowl first will prevent an unmixed dough. Have you ever had flour that refuses to be incorporated at the bottom of your mixing bowl? Adding liquids first will prevent that!
Warm your water in an electric kettle. it only takes seconds…. If you don’t have a kettle you can heat it up on the stovetop or microwave – to just use warm tap water. I like to use filtered water so the kettle works great for that!
To make life easier, once your flour is milled, add the rest of your dry ingredients to the flour. This makes for very easy mixing of the dough. Simply pour dry ingredients into your mixing bowl and turn that sucker on!
The most important tip I have for you in making yeasted breads is to mix it on a medium low setting until the dough forms a ball and is no longer sticking to the sides. BUT more importantly than that is to KEEP MIXING until you see the dough forming a window pane.
Window pane check is when you lift up a portion of the dough and stretch it to see if you can form a thin enough layer to where you can see light coming through it. like this:

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