Milling wheat & making pasta

Yesterday; Celia over at Fig Jam and Lime Cordial posted about her Simple pasta in 15 minute's ......and that got me thinking of another way to thicken up the rest of the weekend soup to make into one more meal.....

Many people mill their own grains at home; and I've been giving it a go too. It's far healthier for you, no additives, no thickeners, no bleaching chemicals....just plain good wholesome wheat! If you have your own grain mill you can mill down a whole number of grains, seeds, nuts and even legumes. You even have full control over how fine you make your flour, depending on what you are planning to do with it.

Since sourcing some good bulk grain I've been experimenting more with my electric grain mill. Here are some photos to show you the different stages of milled grain I've been playing with.........

Stage 1: Wheat berries....Whole clean, husked wheat ready for use.

Stage 2: Cracked wheat....I think cracked wheat is prepared by first boiling it...so this is really just crushed wheat. I've been adding some of this to a mix of whole grains when making 'multi-grain bread' and also sprinkling it on the top of bread rolls.

Stage 3: Wheat Bran....This is what you get when you sift the milled flour from its finest setting. Bran is really a by-product of making flour and is made up of the hard shell of the wheat berry. We're sprinkling this on our breakfast and also adding it to other recipes for added fibre.

If I'm making bread, I don't always sift the flour to separate the bran, but when I don't; it makes a very heavy bread....A better or lighter bread is made from 50:50 of whole milled flour and plain white flour. If you don't want to use such refined and bleached flour....just sift your freshly milled flour.

Stage 4: Wholemeal flour.... Here is your flour at it's purest.....
No refining, no bleaching, no additives.
Just Wheat!

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Now I'm ready to make some WHOLEMEAL PASTA......
To every 100g of flour add 1 whole egg.

To 400g of wholemeal flour add 4 whole eggs....and mix well until combined.............

Then divide into four even blocks before putting it in the fridge to rest. I prefer to rest pasta dough for an hour before running it in the pasta machine.

Flatten the divided dough before placing in a plastic bag and pop into the fridge to rest. This shape helps to start preparing the dough for the dough machine.

Only remove one piece of dough from the fridge at a time. This ensures that the other dough pieces don't  dry out while you are working. I used half the dough for dinner ....the other half will keep in the fridge for one or two more days.

Then I heated up the soup that was made earlier..and also put on a pot of water to boil for the pasta....
Due to the cold weekend weather....another pot of soup was on the stove.....
The soup was made up of the following....

• a smoked ham hock - boiled for an hour, meat removed and added
• a few roasted chicken carcasses, with meat removed and added
• chopped meats left to rest in the stock overnight....then fat skimmed off the top before adding other ingredients
• grated vegetables of carrot, Swedish turnip, parsnip, onion, zucchini
• mixed legumes and grains (another filler and thickener)
• thickened with milled rice flour

When all the rolled pasta is cut into strips, lightly dust it with flour to stop it from sticking to itself.....

Once the water is boiling, add half of the pasta and let cook for 1 minute...remove the pasta with tongs and toss into the boiling soup....Repeat with the other half of the raw pasta. It's very quick!

then serve.........this soup was very filling, delicious...and quite rewarding; even for DS20 who took great joy in helping make the pasta.....Thanks mate...a job well done.

Do you have a grain mill? What other grains do you like to mill? I'd love to hear your ideas. 

Have you ever made your own pasta? Do you prefer wholemeal pasta or white pasta? How do you make your pasta? What do you add it to?