How To Convert Recipes To Freshly Milled Flour

Learn how to convert any recipe to freshly milled flour with my foolproof formula! You can use healthy grains in any recipe with these tricks and tips. I have this conversion chart hanging in my cupboard to convert my favorite recipes to freshly milled flour when I need exact measurements!

I have been milling my own flour long enough to come up with this foolproof formula! If you’re new to milling your own flour at home, check out my post on everything you need to know about making Whole Wheat flour at home using whole grains. I differentiate the different grains and explain my grain mill there.

If a recipe calls for white flour, I make it with freshly milled flour! Converting recipes to grains is a super simple process; however, what type of grain you use will also play a big role!

Once converted, it is hard to go back. My children are used to it now, and the question I get asked now is, “Mom, is this with whole wheat?” you can’t tell! They know it brings me joy when recipes turn out just as good!

I couldn’t be happier to switch and it doesn’t take that long to make a recipe with freshly milled flour.

If you know my system, I have my grain mill on the counter at all times, along with my three main grains: hard red, hard white, and soft white wheat berries. My scale follows as it sits in my drawer.

Having a system makes things flow and is more approachable than pulling the grain mill in and out of the cupboard. Sometimes, I want to whip recipes up, and if I had to drag the mill out every time, I’d probably think twice. So, it’s important to have the grains and grain mill at reach when milling your own flour for recipes.

Using a scale

A kitchen scale is the key to getting accurate results when converting recipes to freshly milled flour. Sure, you can increase your freshly milled flour by ¼ cup for every 1 cup of flour in a recipe, but that only works for soft wheat. I also, find that that method can be a hit or miss because home-ground flour is different from white flour, it can be tricky to measure it in cups because it is not as compact as white flour.

Also, freshly milled flour absorbs liquid slower, so you can’t really tell if you need to add more flour or not until it sits a little and absorbs.

Making freshly milled flour this way has simplified my life!

Why Should I Convert a Recipe to Freshly Milled Flour?

• Health- switching to grains is the best nutrient-dense decision I have made for my family. The benefits of whole grain are amazing! It is the whole, unprocessed grain that is full of good nutrients and fiber that makes me feel good about what I feed my family. I have more energy, and we can stay fuller longer! My friend has even shared how the sugar cravings go away after eating whole wheat bread with freshly milled flour.
• Flavor- milling your own flour adds such a delicious, wholesome flavor to food! In fact, I think it tastes even better in some recipes that I’ve converted.

How to Convert Any Recipe To Freshly Milled Flour:

When I first started I was desperate to use freshly milled flour in my favorite recipes! So, I started by adding 1/4 cup more of freshly milled flour than a traditional white flour recipe would call for, only to realize it wasn’t always accurate and that it didn’t seam to work for bread recipes.

So, if the recipe called for 1 cup of all-purpose flour, I would increase the flour to 1 ¼ cups of freshly milled. Ideally this works great for non-yeast recipes, like quick-bread recipes, pastries, or cookies, anywhere where you’d generally use soft white wheat, not exactly hard wheat.

It wasn’t until I discovered that baking by weight was a total game-changer! If you think it about, freshly milled flour is not as compact as white flour so the volume will be different. However, converting a recipe by weight is the most accurate way to bake with freshly milled flour and if you walk into a bakery, they most likely go by weight because cups can be misleading.

How Do You Bake By Weight?

This chart is a quick reference for flour in grams. In other words, I weighed white flour in all the metric measureing cups I had, put it on a scale one by one, and wrote down the exact amount in grams that each cup equalled. Then, I created this conversion chart for a quick refererence to any recipe.

If you didn’t know, baking by weight stays the same for, grains as it is for freshly milled flour. So, if you need 50 grams of freshly milled flour, you’d weigh 50 grams of wheat berries and mill it, that would be all the flour you need for the recipe. Same thing for white flour, how much it weighs is how much freshly milled flour you need.

How this works, is that any flour converted to grams is the most accurate way of converting measurements, especially in baking.

Here’s My conversion Chart for Freshly Milled Flour:

• 1/4 cup of all-purpose or bread flour= 40 grams of freshly milled flour
• 1/3 cup of all-purpose or bread flour= 50g of freshly milled flour
• 1/2 cup of all-purpose or bread flour= 85g of freshly milled flour
• 2/3 cup of all-purpose or bread flour= 100g of freshly milled flour
• 3/4 cup of all-purpose or bread flour= 115g of freshly milled flour
• 1 cup of all-purpose or bread flour= 155g of freshly milled flour
• 1 1/4 cups of all-purpose or bread flour= 190g of freshly milled flour
• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose or bread flour= 235g of freshly milled flour
• 2 cups of all-purpose or bread flour= 310g of freshly milled flour
• 3 cups of of all-purpose or bread flour= 458g of freshly milled flour

 

Note: freshly milled flour weighs the same as wheat berries, so, you can weigh the grains and mill it to get the same amount of grams as freshly milled flour.

Quick breads:

Most quick breads call for all-purpose or pastry flour, which soft white wheat replicates the most. However, not all quick-bread dough recipes work best with all soft wheat. For instance, if you need all-purpose flour (which is a combination of soft and hard wheat varieties), you’d need to mill half soft and half hard white wheat berries to get all-purpose flour.

I find all-purpose flour works great for pie crust, Homemade Crescent Dough, Tortillas, and Unleavened Bread where you need a little stretch but don’t exactly need yeast.

Yeast Recipes:

I have also learned that the key to using freshly milled flour in yeast recipes is to knead the dough long enough to pass the window pane test. If you use dough enhancers like vital wheat gluten or lecithin, then your kneading time can be reduced. However if you are solely using freshly milled flour and the basic ingredients to make dough, then kneading is a must!

This is where a mixer comes in very handy. I will turn on my KitchenAid mixer to knead pizza dough for 25 minutes. The reason for kneading for so long, is that the liquid absorbs much slower in freshly milled flour that you need to give it time to absorb the liquid and develop the natural gluten found in grains. This process takes longer than white flour because the bran and germ are intact.

It can be very tempting to keep dumping flour in at the beginning because we all want to see instant results in our dough, but I’ve learned that if you give it time, it will absorb the longer it kneads and eventually comes together nicely. Watch it turn into an incredibly pliable dough!

Print My Conversion Chart Below: