Best Mill for Milling Soft Wheat?

John K.

I am interested in purchasing a home mill for milling wheat, but I am particularly interested in purchasing a mill that will mill not only hard wheat but also soft wheat. From looking around on the internet, it appears that hand-cranked mills, even the Diamant, are not really suited to milling soft wheat, which apparently tends to clog them. I suppose that leaves me with electric mills? If so, will some electric mills mill soft wheat and some won't? Any recommendations?

I am particularly interested in soft wheat for a couple reasons. One is that the wheat grown locally is soft wheat, as our climate here in Northern Indiana is apparently not well-suited to growing hard wheat. Also, I've read Ed Wood's Classic Sourdoughs, and he seems to dispute there the very common wisdom that hard high-gluten wheat is better for bread than softer low-gluten wheat, at least for sourdough. And in fact, I tried his recipe for Whole Wheat Sourdough (on his website) using the South African culture and hard red wheat flour and it came out very dense and gluey (although I think I messed up a step and wound up kneading in extra flour at a step when the recipe calls for treating the dough "gently"). I then on my second try substituted organic whole wheat "pastry flour" for the hard wheat flour (although the culture itself I used in the recipe had been fed with hard wheat flour) and it came out much better. I'm now thinking of feeding at least one jar of the culture with soft wheat and seeing how it turns out. 

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LeadDog's picture
LeadDog 2012 June 21

 I think any of the mills that use stones should be able to mill soft wheat.  I know my mill doesn't have any problems with soft wheat.  What mills have you looked at?  The good mills are going to cost you some money just so you know ahead of time.

arturoenk 2012 July 13

 I can't really see that there should be any real difference a wheat grain is a wheat grain and a pretty hard character withal whatever it be. I agree with LeadDog. After all traditional mills milled all sorts of grains.

yarnfloozie 2012 July 13

I've had my Country Living mill for a number of years (over five, probably closer to ten) and have never had trouble with soft wheat. I only mill soft wheat occasionally, though. I also run about a cup of hard wheat through right after milling soft wheat.

lamp's picture
lamp 2012 July 31

You should be able to use any flour mill, I could be wrong but I thought the difference between "hard wheat" and "soft wheat" was the protein content and not the actual hardness of the grains....

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