The Homemade Flour Cookbook: The Home Cook's Guide to Milling Nutritious Flours and Creating Delicious Recipes with Every Grain, Legume, Nut, and Seed from A-Z

Thanks for such a thorough overview. I need to make a list of flours and their uses. I’ll use this book to do that.

This book has helped me in finding simple ways to eat better and healthier w/o complicating my life. I was surprised how easy it is to make just a cup or two of flour in my high power blender whenever I need a little. Rice flour or oat flour is a cinch to make in just seconds! Oat flour added to my dogs shampoo or to bath water works wonders on dry skin and feels so silky soft on the skin. Turns out that's pretty much the same thing as the expensive oat powders used to sooth skin & for relaxing bath times that are sold at specialty stores and pharmacies, & costs only pennies on the dollar by comparison. I've also found that I can use beans or lentils to make one ingredient only pastas and it's very simple, quick, trades empty carbs for fiber & protein, and saves a lot of money for people who buy those expensive specialty pastas. Makes pasta into a healthy meal! This book is an eye opener for me. While it may not have showed me how to make the things I do from my flours, it did open my eyes to all the possibilities and ease of doing it. It is full of ideas, written well, easy to use and understand, and opens the door to unlimited possibilities as it did for me. I eat healthier and save a lot of money on what would be considered gourmet foods and luxury bath items. I don't use all the fancy grains mentioned in the book, but you could. I've stuck to the rice, oat, bean, & lentil flours because of simplicity and ease of getting these from any grocery store out there, as well as saving money. If you wanted to use all the fancy flours, the sky's the limit, but not necessary to make a difference in your cooking and life. I'm not disappointed in this book. I also don't spend a lot of time cooking. Quick & simple is my motto! It was surprising to me that making my own flour for pasta, shampoo & bath water additives could be so cheap, fast, & easy! Love the book & well worth it! This is my own honest review. I didn't receive the book at any discount & wasn't asked to review it for any benefit to me.

Looking at the additives and deceptive packaging of the flour sold in stores -- whether all-purpose, baking, whole-grain, whatever other label -- my family will never buy it again. We buy our grains from area farmers or from whole-food websites and grind them at home for every use. This book is a treasure of our grandmothers' secrets baking every dish you can imagine, teaching which grains to use for which dishes and how to prepare them. It's healthier, of course, but also delicious! Highly recommended.

I bought this book expecting a well-researched and sourced book about milling as told through a set of recipes.What I found was that this book was written by a blogger and was essentially a blog in book form.This was one of the few books dedicated to milling, and as such I was hoping for a cornucopia of well-sourced explanations on milling grains. I was hoping for scientific explanations about how fresh milled wheat flour differs from the kind of flour you buy at the store. I was hoping that there would be a chapter about how to mill, including a breakdown of common type of mills and the pros and cons to each (in detail, with important distinctions such as whether the burrs are cast iron or stone, and why that would matter, etc.)Instead, this book was essentially just recipes made up through experimentation by the author. She does not come across as terribly educated (for example, there is no mention about the lack of gluten in fresh milled wheat flour or about separating your germ and bran from the flour so you can age the endosperm to get that gluten development).I was going to give this a disappointing two or three stars. I thought to myself, this is a lovely blog printed for people who want a book full of pretty pictures. It's nice she did all of this work, and the pictures are gorgeous. But it's not educating me much about grains or milling. It seemed to cater mostly to people care more about looks than substance.So why the four stars?Because I started making the recipes.If you are like me and you are itching to make bread from freshly milled grains but you don't have much experience with such endeavors, I would buy this book and just start making the recipes.I have tried three recipes so far, and each has been simply delicious. I made cookies from freshly milled barley. They were some of the best cookies I have ever made.I made a loaf of bread from fresh milled wheat berries. My associations of "whole wheat" bread for most of my life has referred to the dry, tasteless garbage they sell in grocery stores. Now whole wheat bread makes me think of nutty and moist bread which was a sensory feast. I can't believe I have lived most of my life thinking "whole wheat" bread was healthier but less tasty than white bread. It just needs to be fresh, but it tastes much, much better.This morning I freshly milled some oats and made pancakes. They were better than most desserts I have eaten.I am excited to read this book now. Not because it will teach me much about grains, gluten development, or much of anything at all. But rather, because each page contains a culinary journey - something to try and experience, and which will most likely enrich your world and the worlds of your family.If you want to learn more about wheat and bread, I suggest Hamelman's book "Bread". He is the director at King Arthur Flour Company, and he provides a great deal of information about nearly every aspect of bread making.If you want to learn more about grains, such as how they are grown, I highly suggest Logsdon's "Small-Scale Grain Raising". That book will satisfy your curiosity about the history, uses, and details of growing various grains. It also contains some recipes, which pairs nicely with Alderson's recipe book. However, it doesn't tell you much of anything about milling or about non-grain options for milling (unlike Alderson's book which has recipes for milled nuts and beans, etc.)Ironically, with my curiosity satisfied, I find myself using Alderson's cookbook the most. It drives the practical implementation of my knowledge about milling which I patched together by watching videos, reading other books, and experimenting. Maybe a book will come along that improves upon Alderson's book, by providing additional detail such as provided in Hamelman's and Logsdon's books. But for now, I would say if you want to use your mill, Alderson's cookbook is a great way to do so.

Great book

Excellent - as described!

An excellent book if you have no idea where to start. I love it.

So useful, full of pertinent information on easy to make flours from a w-i-d-e range food items, like coconut, beans, nuts, cereals, grains, etc. Each flour has individual recipes, the book is well put together, with some amazing photos of both the flours and the recipes.

On her blog and in this book, Erin says she lacks patience. Well, writing any book and especially such a complete and precise book certainly asks for a lot of patience and thinking and trying. This means the customer can trust tricks as much as recipes (scrumptious ones, by the way) but anyway trust the author not to propose tricky recipes with 30 strange ingredients. Maybe Amaranth or Fava will sound strange to some readers but they are worth the effort knowing and cooking. Blog style, I'll say "Thanks for sharing". Cook books I have a lot, a great great lot, this is the only one I deeply love from A to Z.