We started milling our own flour. Here's what changed.

Two years ago we bought a small stone mill and installed it in the back corner of the bakery. We had been thinking about it for a long time. Here is what changed once we started using it every day.

Flavor, immediately

Fresh-milled flour smells like flour the way fresh-cracked pepper smells like pepper. Most of the supermarket flour we are familiar with has been sitting on a shelf for months, slowly losing the volatile oils in its bran and germ. Mill the same wheat that morning and the difference is dramatic — the bread tastes nuttier, sweeter, more like the grain itself.

Sourcing got more interesting

Once we owned a mill, we could buy whole wheat berries directly from California farms. We now source from Capay Mills and from a small organic operation outside Davis. We know the names of the farmers. We know which fields the wheat came from. That is a different relationship than buying a fifty-pound sack with a brand name on it.

The bread got more fragile, in a good way

Fresh-milled whole grain flours absorb water differently and ferment faster. We had to retrain our intuition for hydration and timing. The bread that came out the other side was darker, denser in flavor, with more dramatic crusts.

It is more work

This is the honest part. Milling adds an hour to the bakery's morning. Cleaning the mill adds another twenty minutes at the end of the day. But every loaf has been better since we started, and the bakers all say it has made them more curious about their craft. That has been worth it.

Written by Leilani Josef. Last reviewed by our team on 2025-06-18. Have feedback or a question? Email us — we read everything.