reply to post by craig732
Hi Craig,
To bake a proper raised loaf of bread, you need a certain amount of gluten in your flour. It's what makes bread dough "stretchy" and captures the
gas bubbles from the yeast. Wheat I believe has the best gluten content of most flours, but its level varies depending on what type of wheat is grown
and in what season it's grown.
You can purchase gluten (its usu called 'vital wheat gluten') to mix with non- or low-gluten flours to get a rise from your product. Non-gluten
flours can be purchased too, because gluten is the part of wheat that many people are allergic to. Going the other direction, you can form plain
gluten into shapes and use it as a bland meat substitute. Like tofu, it can take on whatever flavors you desire. If you don’t want to buy wheat
gluten, you can also mix wheat flour in with your non-gluten flour for a similar effect.
HOWEVER! You can make quick breads (like pancakes, muffins, cornbread, etc) without gluten flour – just need baking soda or baking powder. Also you
can make flat-breads, like pitas, chapatis, tortillas, etc, etc… without gluten flour or baking soda/powder period.
Here is a partial list of non-wheat flours:
Cook's Thesaurus: Non-Wheat Flours
This is a good site with good info also:
Bob's Red Mill
To make flour from wheat… you need to be able to grow it, harvest it, thresh it, winnow it, de-bran it (if you want white flour); grind/mill it, and
store it. If you are storing whole-grain flour that has been ground/milled, it needs to be kept refrigerated or the natural oils that are released
will go rancid. It sounds like this can be very challenging process. I hope to try this year with amaranth. Some grains like quinoa (or acorns as
discussed above) have another step (for quinoa: soaking and flushing to remove saponins) added to the process. However I hear that this flush water
is good for washing laundry!
You might find this blog post from someone making bread from a home mill interesting (I did!):
Home Milling - 2 more tries
Sounds like you can get pretty involved in this! Anybody here have actual experience growing and milling grains?
Thanks,
1080
I am now inspired to make acorn flour - lol!
) 
