Wheat vs. Flour

I often get asked questions that require a specific answer for the person asking. Like, how much flour do you put in your bread recipe? Or how long do you knead the dough? Or how many children do you have? HA! Just seeing if you're awake.

Most of the time specifics are not very important to me. When it comes to bread, I mostly do it by feel and what I see happening to the dough. So, I'm trying to pay a bit more attention when I'm baking bread or doing other skill-related tasks so that I can return and report.

My husband and I were talking about how much wheat we felt we needed to have in storage in order to have at least a year's supply. He's a perfectionist/specific kinda guy. This frustrates us both from time to time. :)

Today I made some wheat bread. I decided to measure out wheat berries and then grind them and measure the flour that was created.

I put two cups of wheat berries into the grinder and out came a little over four cups of flour. So, that should help you and my husband for future wheat calculations.

2 Cups Wheat Berries = 4 Cups of Whole Wheat Flour

An additional note: I tend to mix and match my grains and legumes when making bread. Today's bread was 4 cups of wheat berries, 1 cup dried navy beans, 1 1/2 cups of buckwheat and about 1/3 cup of whole flax seed. This combo produced 13 1/2 cups of flour. Turned out to be the right amount for my dough today.

My recipe also called for 1/2 cup of oatmeal. I had a daughter who made oatmeal for breakfast this morning and about 1/2 cup of cooked oatmeal was left. Perfect! I just threw it in the water when mixing up the dough. That could've contributed a bit for the extra amount of flour I needed.