Freshly Milled Flour vs. Store-Bought
“Also take for yourself wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt; put them into one vessel, and make bread of them for yourself. During the number of days that you lie on your side, three hundred and ninety days, you shall eat it.” Ezekiel 4:9
Though I don’t mean to take this out of context, this is just one time in the Bible where making bread is mentioned. God gave us resources and ingredients to use to bake this bread mentioned—in this verse specifically it mentions taking wheat (among other ingredients) and making bread of it. Though our modern white flour is used with wheat berries, companies take out the most nutritious parts of the berry in order to extend shelf life…when did this practice begin? What does this mean for our health? Let’s take a deeper look at the issue.
There are three parts to a wheat berry: the bran, germ, and endosperm. In modern processing, companies remove the bran and germ so that they can keep flour for more than days at a time. The issue with this is that the only portion of the wheat berry we are getting in our bodies is the endosperm, which does not contain nearly as many nutrients as the bran and germ.
it was somewhere in the 1870s or 1880s that producers recognized if they took out these portions of the wheat berry, the shelf life of flour could be extended. From a business (and generally efficiency) standpoint, this is excellent news. This means that the general public no longer had to mill flour for every batch of bread they made. It meant that sellers did not have to worry about waste. It meant that suppliers could have more time to get product out. It meant efficiency and it meant one less thing to do.
Unfortunately, it also meant nutritional deficiencies. To combat this, the United States mandated that producers add nutrients back into flour in the 1940s. We went further and further from the source and it caused a decline in our nutritional health. Surely God wants us to eat what He provided us with, right? This is why we as a company continue to strive to as clean of an ingredient label as possible.
We live in a society that is go, go, go. People not only want efficiency, but NEED it. They couldn’t possibly make the time to mill their own flour, drive to the farmer’s to pickup their milk, or prepare home-cooked meals weekly—they are going to grab what is readily available. So no, pastries do not grow out the ground but I do believe that if people are going to consume pre-cooked food, we can at least aim for a more natural, cleaner version of these foods. God blessed us with grains, fruit, and other ingredients to bake with. Why don’t we try out hardest to source them naturally and do as much “in-house” as we possibly can?
That is why we are experimenting with freshly-milled flour! Be on the lookout for this exciting update to our products! 👀
https://youtu.be/tB242H6Q5-s?si=3gmfThFX-bK8SYJI
Sources and further reads:
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=X0_-BAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA24&dq=data+on+health+effects+of+population+after+taking+out+bran+and+germ+from+flour+in+1800s&ots=pDqEJc4GZy&sig=2p7pT32OIvXGlPhIHLqRyQuLekI#v=onepage&q&f=false (Very interesting and informative)