Proving our bread wheat

Mr. Fritillary set himself the task of figuring out how to thresh our bread wheat this rainy weekend. Surprisingly, the meat grinder did the best job of it. The blades chop the heads, but very few of the grains. And we were threshing some of the last of the wheat that was harvested damp, so not the easiest to thresh.

This is the chaff and kernels after going through the meat grinder once.

We winnowed it a few times using a small house fan. The chaff easily blew away, leaving behind a mostly clean grain. This is where Mr. Fritillary brought it into the kitchen and let me take over the fun part, as he dilligently ground away a rainy day. After picking out a few bits and blowing away some of the finer chaff, this is the end result. It is actually cleaner than the organic grain we have been buying.
We always knew that the locally grown organic wheat kernels we were buying were a bit on the small size, and I could never make a decent loaf of bread using these kernels alone. I had to add some commercial bread flour, or end up with either a dense undercooked loaf or a gaping cavern in the middle. Here is a comparison of the purchased organic kernels on the left and our homegrown wheat on the right. Judging by kernel size and the amout of gluten inside of them, we were pretty confident it would make decent bread flour on its own.For now I am just using a roller mill to grind my flour. Mr. Fritillary is busy setting our little stone flour mill up on a bicycle, it is hard cranking by hand.
The flour is coarse and full of bran. It can be separated into flour and bran, but we enjoy a more rustic bread.

It makes a sticky dough, unkneedable. I mix it with a spoon until I can see the strings of gluten forming and it begins to come away from the sides of the bowl.

Beautiful rising loaves. This dough is very delicate and can easily flatten.

I got it in the oven just a few minutes late, and the top flattened out a bit. But overall, not a bad loaf. I think it needs to be baked at a higher temperature. This is not prize winning bread, improvements will be made. But our homegrown wheat proved to be worthy of bread flour!

Apple Butter on a steaming slice of bread?