Rather than buy white cakey flour, consider switching to artisan flours, locally milled to preserve nutrition and taste better too! Or try alternative flours like spelt (an ancient cousin of wheat), oat and teff. If you make bread, pastry or cakes you’ll (usually) need flour, which is made by grinding wheat, beans or nuts (most windmills today have the sails long-gone). In 1834, one Sunderland man was tragically killed when the sails flung him off the building, as he tried to repair a weatherboard in a terrible storm.
Keep fresh dough away from young children and pets (can expand in the stomach) and may contain unsafe ingredients (salt, garlic etc). Read more on keeping people & pets safe in the kitchen. Never give crusty or mouldy/hard bread to birds or wildfowl (nor buttered bread), as fat smears on feathers (affecting waterproofing/insulation).
Doves Farm is the main brand to look for in stores, with an extensive range of organic and gluten-free flours and baking essentials (baking soda, yeast). The organic farm is nestled in the North Wessex Downs and provides homes for bees, birds, butterflies and skylarks, and the company works with other organic growers. It uses solar panels on site and grains are grown using crop rotation to produce quality grains.
This brand was founded back in 1977 when most people would buy a cotton-wool type white loaf from the supermarket. The couple bought an old stone-grinding mill and began to sell wholemeal flour in bags, and today it offers a range of wholegrain flours including rye, spelt (easier on the digestion) and einkorn along with teff, oats and quinoa flours (also sold in sacks).
There are many types of flours to choose from, and the site has a good guide on which flours to choose for which purpose. The range includes brown rice, oat and quinoa flours (gluten-free). The site lists simple recipes like 3-ingredient soda bread rolls and seeded loaves for bread machines.
Or use their seeded bread mix (just add water & oil, to make one loaf or 8 rolls).
other good brands of artisan flour
Wildfarmed works with 50 local farmers to sell flours made with regenerative farming (rotating crops to increase nitrogen and absorb carbon, so no pesticides are needed, great for wildlife). The range includes wholemeal, countryside (like a light wholemeal) and flours for bread, pizza and flatbread.
The Prior’s Flour (Cambridgeshire) offers organic stonegrain flours created by a master miller, ground on horizontal French burr stones to preserve natural vitamin content. This mill is over 160 years old, and stands on a site where mills have worked since the times of Domesday.
Matthews Cotswold Flour offers organic stoneground wholegrain flours, using techniques handed down by generations since the 1800s.
Shipton Mill is a renowned organic mill, which is run on renewable energy and offers a fine line of artisan flours. The land is carefully kept natural, to offer homes for native wildlife including otters, kingfishers, damselfies and wild brown trout.
