There are plenty of reasons why you might want to grind your own flour. In fact, there are a number of recipes out there that suggest you grind your own flour in order to ensure freshness and quality of ingredients.
You certainly can grind grains in a Vitamix! The powerful motor within the Vitamix is designed with plenty of power to be able to grind any grains that you put through it, from wheat to rice and anything in between.
If you already have a Vitamix, it’s only natural to wonder if you could use it to grind flour. Well, we’re going to answer just that question!
Can You Grind Grains In A Vitamix?
In order to properly grind grains in a Vitamix, you’ll need a dry container. This container is just like the usual upper section of your Vitamix, but it’s designed for use with gry ingredients. It also contains a different blade, a dry blade, which is used specifically for grinding grain into flour and kneading any dough within the Vitamix.
Grinding your own flour this way allows you to make sure that the flour you’re using in your baking projects at home is perfectly safe and as good as can be. For example, if you were to grind wheat with your Vitamix, you would be able to pick whether you wanted to make white flour or wholemeal.
White flour is made from just the germ of the wheat berry, while wholemeal flour also incorporates the outer layer of the seed – also known as the bran. By grinding your own flour, you’ll be able to make sure to get a precise percentage of bran in your flour, leading to the perfect flour for your projects.
How Do I Use My Vitamix Grain Grinder?
Well, it’s actually really simple!
Ordinarily, you would use a Vitamix by assembling it, making sure that it’s plugged in, and then adding your ingredients. Of course, you would then turn on the appliance, and blend until the desired consistency is reached. The exact same thing happens when grinding grain with your Vitamix.
The only thing that’s different from normal use is the body of the blender that you use. You must remove the standard Vitamix chamber, and use a dry container instead. This container is specifically made in order to ensure that you can grind grains and knead dough at home. It also contains a dry blade which, again, is made to ensure that you can grind grains from the comfort of your own home.
How Do I Grind Flaxseed In My Vitamix?
Grinding flaxseed in your Vitamix is really simple. You’ll first need to remove the standard upper chamber of your Vitamix, and then replace it with one that is suitable for grinding grains. We would suggest that you use the Vitamix dry container, as it is the option available directly from Vitamix, and the quality is very high.
Once the dry container is in place on the top of the Vitamix, you can simply pour in as much flaxseed as you need, and start the grinding process.
Whenever you’re grinding any kind of grain within the Vitamix, start at Variable speed 1, and then work your way up to variable speed 10. The reason that you want to blend in that way is that going start to a high speed could damage the blender.
The gearbox of the blender itself isn’t expecting such a high change of speed from zero to ten, and it will not be able to cope. If you do that, the gears may break, leading to the Vitamix not working itself.
Can You Make Flour With A Vitamix?
Good news, you can grind your own flour using your Vitamix! While you’ll need a dry container with its own blade to do it properly, it’s certainly something you can do in your home.
What type of flour you make will, of course, depend on what type of flour you want. If you want to make wheat flour, then you can make wheat flour, though any other type of flour can also be made with a Vitamix.
To make wheat flour, you must first find a recipe. We’ve got a great one down below, but anyone will do. You can then get started with the making, by adding the correct ingredients to the dry container of your Vitamix one by one and then blending in accordance with the instructions.
Whatever you do, make sure that you start the dry blade at a low speed and then slowly increase it to the highest speed. The reason that you want to do this is to give the gearbox chance to come to speed slowly, to decrease the risk of potential damage to any of the gears.
Can the Vitamix Knead Dough?
It certainly can! While the dry container for the Vitamix is designed with grinding grains in mind first and foremost, it can also be used to knead dough that you have made within the Vitamix.
This actually makes the Vitamix a great appliance for creating your own bread straight from wheat berries. Once the dry container is attached to the top of the Vitamix, you can add in as many wheat berries as you’d like for the volume of flour that you’re hoping to produce. Once the Vitamix has processed those berries into flour, you can go ahead and add in the remaining ingredients for a loaf of bread. Typically, this will be water, salt, and yeast.
Pour the water, salt, and yeast directly into the Vitamix with the freshly milled flour, and then pulse the blades for a few seconds. When the blades have combined everything, allow the whole mixture to rest for a moment to ensure that the flour is properly hydrated.
To begin kneading the dough, you’ll need to pulse the blades of the Vitamix five times or so every few seconds. Repeat that process as many times as you need to create a dough ball that will sit within the Vitamix itself. This should take about fix or six pulsing sessions.
In between each pulsing session, make sure to scrape the sides of the blender down, thereby bringing any unhydrated flour into the center, making sure that it can get fully wet.
When the kneading process is complete, pulse the blades for about two seconds to lift the ball of dough away from the bottom of the dry container, and then tip it out into a container to prove and bake.
Hard Wheat Vs Soft Wheat
There are a number of different recipes out there for wheat flour for one main reason: different types of wheat have different chemicals within them which would result in a different end product when made into flour.
At a fundamental level, there are two types of wheat: soft and hard. These types are differentiated in a number of ways, and often blended to achieve a specific percentage of protein.
Hard wheat is typically bronze-colored and has a particularly high protein content. This protein content is relevant because it is the protein that becomes gluten during the process of making bread. Therefore, flour with a high protein content yields products with high gluten contents. For this reason, harder wheat is often used for bread, among other products.
Soft which is typically a light golden color, and has more starch and less gluten, when compared to hard wheat. This means that it is ideal for any bake which would benefit from having a crumbly texture, such as cakes, pastries, and desserts.
When you buy a bag of flour from the supermarket, it will have the protein content of that flavor in particular labeled on it. If it’s cake flour or bread flour, it may be purely soft or hard wheat.
However, if it’s somewhere in the middle, then you’re likely to buy a blend of soft and hard wheat. For example, all-purpose flour is almost always a blend of the two types of wheat. Different brands will have different proprietary blends of wheat that they use to make their flour. Once you’ve found a brand you like, stick with it!
As we said above, the protein content of the flour is relevant in how much gluten it will produce during the bread-making process. The protein content of the flour is, really, determined by how much of the germ is in the final product. While the bran does contain a lot of protein, the germ is the portion of the wheat grain that holds the most. Therefore, harder wheat may have a larger germ than softer wheat and vice versa.
Wheat flour recipe
There’s no hard and fast recipe for making your own wheat flour, you simply need to decide upon a wheat berry, and then grind it until it is a uniform consistency. The three most common types of wheat are hard white, hard red, and soft white.
Hard white wheat is utterly ideal for bread baking – it has a high gluten content. It also has a sweeter, lighter flavor than other, similar wheat, making it ideal for tastier bread.
Hard red wheat will typically produce denser bread, making it ideal for flatbread like a tortilla. The flavor profile is a little heartier, making this wheat more ideal for someone that wants a little more bite to their loaves.
Soft white wheat is quite low in gluten, making flour milled from this grain more ideal for pastries and other baked good which don’t, really, need a strong gluten structure.
There are other wheat berries that can be ground into flour too, though they’re less common, and used more for artisan bread than daily loaves. These types include einkorn, spelt, and rye.
Conclusion
Vitamixes are extremely versatile appliances and can be used for any number of tasks in the kitchen. If you do not own one yet in your kitchen, we recommend the Vitamix E310 Explorian Blender.
As such, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that they can be used to grind your own flour and then incorporate that flour into a beautiful dough.
Now that you’re armed with the knowledge of how best to use your Vitamix, happy milling!