The long way to your own flour mill (with valuable tips)

The long way is the story about how to get your own flour mill.

The smell of baked goods from the oven, in the Schmalzauslassen pan, Krapfen-promising and Omis vaunted yeast dough, hand-whipped in the Weitling of course – Grandma was from the country and had all, all the virtues and the knowledge around the house and the family, these women (born in 1907) – pervades my Lower Austrian childhood, since I can remember.

Later, Omi was a janitor in Vienna. The flour always came into the house in paper packets from the store.

My mother tells me that during the war, and especially in the post-war period, Grandma fed her family by working for farmers, which she had been able to do since she was young, and thus got eggs and vegetables. After the grain harvest, they went to pick up the leftover grain, and the few kilos they collected were taken to the mill for grinding. The same weight, the collected grain possibly from two others before. Only those who came with larger quantities received their own grain back from the miller.

Then I fell in love with an Italian, and 23 years of Friuli saw a daughter and a son grow up, too. I must have had a flour mill, but it was “cold”: “integral” was frowned upon, and so I did not learn to use it. My Munich friend – she’s the self-confident one, I’m the more quiet one – waited for the graduation party of her likewise Italian husband in the garden of her Comonese in-laws to the extensive circle of friends and family Pizza Integrale, who laughingly got their Italo-five. SUCH ZEUGS, that eat only le Patate!

Zistersdorf – The spelt shaft rolled, the grain grinder was Kenwood attachment. Grandma and mother, who had married there now, had started to grind the flour for some things themselves. AND IT WAS simply delicious, but yielded dishes rather than baked goods or breads. This was bought, often in the supermarket.

To my 60th, “round” birthday, in the meantime again in Vienna landed, and now single household, I approached courageously with clear desire the gift want of my mother, and desired: please an oak queen (model without plastic: https://agrisan.at/shop/salzburger-getreidemuehle-max-spezial-eiche-ohne-kunststoffe/) and a nut wood flaker! (from which come wonderfully fresh oat flakes for pastries, as “Bemehlung von Weckerln” and also for oat milk me; freshly crushed, precious for our cell walls, linseeds, which taste so wonderfully fresh-nutty: the healthiest “oil”; poppy seeds and caraway seeds, if I want to add it once so crushed). I had before – in my moving apartment was all to renovate! – Installment payments agreed, but here was the opportunity to get exactly what I now wanted in my life finally, as a gift, because “my things” had all remained in Italy.

AND I CAME!

I’m not fibbing when I say that at least every fifth phone call I make to my mother, I thank her, tell her how I’m back-discovering this or that, AND HOW SOULFUL I AM, even physically, when I’m preparing alarm clocks, bakery or pasta about two or three times a week:

there is the nurturing of the leaven. THAT was perhaps a chapter! Mowing me through youtube tutorials, I was simply and truly discouraged. Il lievito madre, the pizza dough, the excellent Mr. Lutz Geissler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWks9IQyyLs … with grain pure sourdough, refrigerator storage and and…. OH WEH! It wanted to settle obviously first…and it COULDN’T be ordered as with the impressive Mr. Geißler! You can keep your own sourdoughs for each type of grain you like to process – for me, it’s woodland rye and Einkorn. At the airport of Stockholm there is even a sourdough hotel, where the family fodder is maintained during the absence of the family!

I love the rounded totality of the process. Just like grandma’s wonderful lard doughnuts, because of which you were not allowed to go into the living room, where they were covered, freshly “walked”, with the diced bacon wonderfully fragrant began,

so now I too stand quietly in my kitchen orchestra with my sourdough as a professor, which I cheerfully take to myself -.
it is at room temperature on a blue Kolzov plate / https://www.kolzov-platten.com/kolzov-platten-serie-elite-2019-2021/, which keeps very well fresh, so the water portions healthy structure, because I have noste mold problems. The sourdough matures fully encounter happy in the gummilos covered Weckglas of Mrs. Sybille Gmiashunger / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZvN2MY48tk/. And I note that I resort to Germ now rather rarely.

It is rejuvenated every other day with fresh flour and a little water; sometimes I eat some of it. The flour is freshly home-ground – Mr. Allram’s Demeter grain, where I discovered his forest perennial also Slow-Foor Presidium, later – the water filtered.

It is so simple!
They are such simple and so sacredly old sequences of actions, and it is beautiful as a space-flux experience overall. It is quite different healthy and with nuts, seeds and further (aronia berries,…) in each case exactly what you feel like and also the body, the season, the Befindlichkeit…. and brings someone, me, who otherwise works in word worlds, writes,

so wonderfully back to Italy, where I had lived; to the kitchen of my mother-in-law Rosita, to my sister, landlady now in Untertullnerbach, a great Insgesamthauswalterin; to the old, romantic former convent and hunting lodge of my Munich friend on the Winterbacher Engelberg near Stuttgart, where the teachers of the Rudolph Steiner School historically live AND Bake! And in those of some other friends, who all grind and bake themselves, partly for many-headed families, true children’s symphonies as if it were from Joseph Haydn’s saub’rer musical notation.

And it goes so well with my green-earth solid oak furniture that I become a custom in it, sifting to get finer flour for sweet baked goods,

when I process, for example, the gingerbread dough recipe: https://www.ploetzblog.de/2019/12/21/honigkuchen-lebkuchen-nach-einem-rezept-von-1883/ after months of maturing the dough.

My next project: pizzoccheri to give credit to a friaul buckwheat pasta recipe “that I can dig into”, funnily enough now in Austria the first time: not buying the pasta ready. This young man prepares the pizzoccheri here in the open air in his Carnic home, while further up in the forest the deer pass by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1kJTgUW1yI.

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My mineral white Ankarsrum, thankfully as an installment purchase, is from the small company of Salzburg grain mills humanly a friendly and conscious gesture towards their own customers,

and likewise: simply freedom! It works them, or I before, with the hands pleasurable kneading happy.

Now that it’s getting cooler again, I’m baking more, I think I’ll go back to keeping two sourdoughs: one made from forest dew and a much milder one made from Einkorn, which really grinds into liquid gold! A tender warm pleasure! And fresh grain porridges suit me at all! Refreshing, not burdensome, especially if stirred the day before, and the special digestive enzymes that the body needs, after a few days he has wonderfully ready. Very very pleasant to the body, with the sensation of “structure-saving/mineralizing, strongly cleansing, verlebendig”.

For me I have learned:
1. To give time for the millings to come out when I need fine flour.
2. complete each grinding process with a short idle, as this still outputs very fine residual flour, and thus the grinding stones probably remain cleaner.
3. that with my Ankarsrum, when it is a little lower, I have a much more pleasant dough work.
4. to start the steam in the slight extra warmth of the freshly ground grain, or first of all to knead it by hand: in the grain blossoming into its new state, where “its essence is now more deeply liberated”, is truly beautiful. As I said, it brings me delicately into many kitchens too, all of whom I have been allowed to heart into my life, as friends, as family, and gives me a happy EternalEarthVirtues〜vibration͠, like a little lake of happiness, somewhere still.

From an ultimately rushed “that’s-as-well-as”,
I thank these three devices that I have these preparation actions, and also their pleasing variety of possibilities,

again consciously in joy grunde, in many real moments of my life, and now again to bake and further, enjoy. With history in my own life story… the eros of appreciation and gratitude, as if it were a library and the time to stay in it, boundless.

Thank you, also for the humanly so gratifying way in which these three kitchen appliances have managed to enter my life, since the manufacturers themselves pretend such a pleasant lifestyle, friendly and correct by themselves.