Are you striving for better health by baking from scratch? Do you look at each ingredient and evaluate their necessity, health, and nutritional value? If you’re not, you should. Why? Because, like everything else, the baking industry has lied to us about the ingredients we are using.

One of the biggest lies is in the flour you use for all your delicious homemade baked goods. You’re thinking you’ve just made delicious chocolate chip cookies. But is it better and healthier than the store bought? Yes, your cookies are fresher, taste better, and contain healthier ingredients. Especially if you’re not baking with corn syrup and aluminum baking powder.

However, the flour you’re using may not be adding natural nutritional value to your treats. Or worse, it may add harmful chemicals to your home-baked goods.

Until I started grinding my own wheat and diving into fresh baking with fresh wheat, I thought the same thing as you do. It’s from scratch, I’m making it, it must be healthy for my family. I too fell for the deceptions from the at-home baking industry.

Remember, just because it’s from scratch doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

What is in fresh ground wheat flour?

Grinding your own wheat berries and baking with it right away creates fresh ground wheat flour. It is the most nutritious flour available. Why? Because when you grind your own wheat, you consume the complete wheat berry without losing any nutrients. Fresh ground flour includes the wheat germ, wheat germ oil, bran, and wheat flour endosperm. This means you gain 26 essential vitamins and minerals from grinding your own wheat berries for baking.

Over the years, I’ve seen different writings on how long the nutritional value lasts once the wheat berries have been milled. Some say within 10 to 24 hours, while other resources say there hasn’t been enough testing. Personally, I’ve had 30 plus year old wheat that still grinds fresh and sprouts. I didn’t test for nutritional value, but the taste, smell, and texture was amazing. When it comes to nutritional benefits, I believe fresher is better. In the case of wheat berries, the freshness is held within the berry until it is ground into flour or sprouted.

Always use organically grown wheat berries because they are non-gmo and non-pesticide sprayed. No, the nutritional value doesn’t change, but the amount of toxic chemicals does.

Now that you know what’s in fresh ground wheat berries for flour, let’s investigate store bought flour.

Store-bought flour ingredients and what they mean.

Let’s break down what’s in or not in your store-bought flour. Ingredients and information may vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. Be sure to read the ingredients on every package of flour before you purchase it. Each manufacturer can have different terms and information. Below is a list of ingredients that could be in your flour and what each term means. Some manufacturers give you all the information, some do not.

• Whole Grain Flour means you’re getting the entire wheat berry into flour form. This includes wheat flour endosperm, wheat germ, wheat germ oil, and bran. The flour can be from winter or spring white whole wheat or red whole wheat.
• Unbleached Flour comes from hard red or hard white wheat berries, but doesn’t include the wheat germ, wheat germ oil, or bran. It has not been bleached. Many companies use a sifting process to make the flour look more white.
• Bleached Wheat Flour means the flour comes from wheat berries that have been stripped of their wheat germ, wheat germ oil, and bran. Plus, the flour has gone through a process of being bleached with chemicals or has added bromates to it, which makes the flour look more white. Both bleaching and added bromates add chemicals to your flour.
• Enriched flour can be bleached or unbleached. Being enriched means the manufacturer has added back into the flour certain vitamins which were either stripped from the wheat berry or never existed in the wheat berry in the first place. I found two different enriched ingredients that kept coming up in my research. We don’t know whether they enrich the flour through synthetic or natural means. The two different ingredient lists are below.
  • Niacin (a B vitamin), Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate (vitamin B1), Riboflavin (vitamin B2), Enzymes, Folic Acid (a B vitamin).
  • Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid)
• Enzymes are a natural part of whole wheat flour, which helps the flour break down starches to sugar. Since enzymes can vary from crop to crop, some manufacturers add enzymes to create a consistent product. Warning, according to USDA organic regulations, enzymes do not have to be from an organic source in order to be in an organic product.
• All Purpose Flour vs Bread Flour. The same rules apply to ingredients if it’s a whole grain or not. The major difference between bread flour and all purpose flour is the protein content of the wheat berries. This is not the same as the protein nutritional value. Some recipes say to use one or the other.
• Organic vs non-organic. Organic flour means the wheat berries are non-gmo, have not been sprayed with synthetic pesticides or herbicides, and have not been processed on machinery that was used without proper cleaning of non-organic wheat berries or milling.

Storing Wheat Flour

You can properly store wheat berries for decades. Ground wheat is a different story. All purpose and bread flour can be stored in an air-tight container in your cupboard until expirations date. Whole grain wheat flour needs to be stored in an air-tight container in your freezer. Because whole grain flour includes the wheat germ, which has wheat germ oil, it can go rancid easier.

Regardless of where you choose to store your flour, make sure you put bay leaves inside the container. Bay leaves help to keep your flour fresher and without bugs.

Now what?

Now you know what the different ingredients in your flour are and what they mean. Now you need to pick the best flour for your baking. Please, don’t go by what is on sale or what your mother or you have always used. Just because something has always been done in a certain manner doesn’t mean you should continue.

For all your baking needs, buy an organic whole wheat flour. Most likely, the only ingredients will be organic whole grain hard red (or white) wheat. Yes, whole wheat flour has been given a bad name for not baking the same or tasting as good as bleached flour.

Yes, you may need to find whole wheat flour recipes to start, but you will also learn small changes you can make to your favorite recipes. Like whole wheat flour absorbs more liquid. This means you will either need to adjust your liquid or flour. Whole wheat treats may seem a little heavier than unbleached flour. This is because most of the nutritional value has been taken out of unbleached and bleached flour. You can add white or apple cider vinegar to the recipes to compensate for the heaviness.

No, cooking and baking with whole wheat flour will not be the same as other flours, but you will learn to make adjustments. Plus, you will gain cooking knowledge, have healthier treats, and be getting more nutrients with every bite you take.

Go buy a five-pound bag of organic whole wheat flour today. Just start making some treats, learn some tricks of using whole wheat flour, and gain nutritional benefits to boot.

Now get going, you can do it!