Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains

by Adam Leonti, Katie Parla, Marc Vetri (Foreword)

The most accessible and authoritative guide to making delicious homemade bread using flour milled from whole grains—with dozens of recipes! “Bread lovers of all skill levels are sure to find themselves returning to this one time and again.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)A pioneer of the at-home milling movement, Adam Leonti has written the definitive guide that modernizes this old-world tradition for home cooks and amateur breadheads. With step-by-step photographs and comprehensive instructions to guide you through each technique, plus guidance on all aspects of home milling, including sourcing wheat or flour and choosing the right equipment for your kitchen, Flour Lab is a master class at making better-tasting and more nutritious food.Thirty-five recipes for bread, pasta, pizza, cake, and pastry serve as a practical base, and Leonti provides dozens of delicious recipes to tailor them to your taste, •  Potato Rolls with Honey Butter; Bagels; Yeasted Ciabatta•  Canderli (bread dumplings); Ricotta and Lemon Zest Ravioli; Chicken Liver and Saffron Ragù•  Butter, Honey, and Lavender Bianco-style Pizza; Robia, Mortadella, and Arugula Pizza al Taglio; Tomato and Stracciatella Pizza Napoletana• Pastry, Cookies, and  Biscotti with almond and grapefruit; Whole Wheat Croissants; Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese FrostingEmbracing freshly milled flour in these recipes—and all the ones you already love to make—will ensure that you never have a stale meal again.Praise for Flour Lab“Do you want to make pasta from freshly milled our? Pizza and focaccia? Pastry and bread? The genius of this book is that it expands the possibilities of using freshly milled grains—think flavor, texture, nutrition, uniqueness—across a broad, delicious spectrum. Adam Leonti’s Flour Lab is clearly composed, enthusiastic, and inspiring.”—Ken Forkish, author of Flour Water Salt Yeast“Flour Lab is not only a beautiful and inspiring book, but it also vividly portrays, through its excellently written narrative and amazing recipes, the personal—yet universal—journey of the artisan soul. Adam Leonti’s own discovery process of the joys of milling and baking with fresh flour is now a lasting and enriching gift to us all.”—Peter Reinhart, author of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Bread Revolution, and Perfect Pan Pizza

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Cooking, Nonfiction

250 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Vincent Ziffle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was initially a big fan of this unique guide to baking with freshly-milled flour. Adam’s passion has sent me across my small city, finding wheat berries where I can and comparing flavour profiles after milling in my Mockmill (also purchased thanks to the healthy plug in the text). Some of the bread recipes have turned out well and rival the satisfaction I get out of breads from Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast. However, the caveat emptor is this: the book is not particularly easy to follow, and attention to pedagogical details is not Adam’s strong suit. From a professed baking educator, this is beyond frustrating. The step by steps on how to preshape loaves and also give final shape are scattered throughout the book and appear jarringly after ciabatta which has no reliance on them. The references to to particular images are mislabelled, not consistently adhered to and often send you to the middle of the action, leading to some backtracking through unrelated tips and comments to get to useful info (that is often found repeated elsewhere in the least convenient interstices of the cookbook). And where is a complete list of commercial and ancient/heirloom grains with mapped sources and every gluten vs. overall protein and starch profile identified? Canada— a massive source of hard wheat throughout North America— is somehow ignore as well, apart from brief mention of Dave Fife’s namesake staple wheat. Two and a half cursory pages are not enough given Adam’s mandate that we move away from premilled flour to ad hoc, bespoke blends. A book which should have been ideal for a novice wanting to up her game from FWSY to fresh-milled excellence will need some patience to use Flour Lab to its greatest extent. For now, I am happy to have my mill and a source of fresh flour to add flavour to Forkish’s bulletproof recipes. Hopefully the many missteps are corrected in the second edition of Flour Lab.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've started getting into milling my own flour but have had a hard time finding cookbooks that are designed specifically around home milling. This one seems to fit the bill. I think I will end up buying this one because I felt like it was the most comprehensive one I've seen yet. I especially liked how much information he gave in the first few chapters about types of wheat, types of mills, general info about wheat and milling, supplies, cooking tips - then on to the recipes. While I haven't tried any of the recipes yet, they look pretty simple to follow and there is a wide variety of recipes. This book has definitely inspired me to source some more varieties of wheat and try to expand beyond just whole wheat bread.

[Ellen Bloomfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

The pictures are fabulous and the intro intriguing. However the information and recipe sections lacked a lot of details I desired. Is anyone still growing Magog wheat? Where can I get some at? What other wheats or blend of wheats have similar characteristics. I’m definitely hanging onto this book but earlier books I’ve read have more immediate useful information on milling.

I understand what he means about putting grain through a new stone mill but a MockMill 100 should not require 5 pounds to clean it. I’m guessing he’s talking about a larger mill but the text is not clear. Oh and a lot of us have impact mills. He completely ignored those.

[Francis Augusto Medeiros-Logeay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to start milling my flour at home, so I thought of reading this book first.
The authors do a great job to tach you the basics, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
However, there are three things I wasn't a big fan:
- Half of the book (give it or take it) is filled up with recipes. While that is ok, I really expected more about the milling process, how to achieve good quality flour, etc. The authors do approach these topics, but I think the amount of recipes ended up taking precious space that could be devoted to the milling process.
- The book is a bit too American-centric. Readers from other parts of the world will have trouble to relate to Sonora/Warthog wheat, for example.
- Topics that are interesting when it comes to home milling are left out. Aging flour to get more gluten/higher rise, for example. Home milling is really a complex field, as I am coming to learn, so I wish this was less a recipe book and more of a "all you need to know about home milling your flour".

Otherwise, pretty interesting, informative and fun book to read.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks for the free book, @clarksonpotter!

Adam Leonti has a passion. After training as a chef, spending years in professional kitchens, he found something that he was even more passionate about than making delicious food. He started milling his own flours to use in those delicious dishes. And now he’s taking all of his expertise and offering it up to us in Flour Lab. Subtitled An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains, this cookbook is exactly what is says. But with the most gorgeous photography and recipes that make mouth-watering breads, pizza, pasta, and pastries.

Chef Leonti has come to believe that commercialized flour is not good for us. Yes, it’s cheap and shelf stable, which is something we needed to survive for much of our history. Now, as we get back to eating all-natural, organic, simply honest ingredients, he says it’s time we get back to milling our own flours too.

To be fair, he grew up with a mother who milled her own flour, so it’s not a new idea to him. But for those who are interested in joining him in this movement, he has lots of advice, from what kind of equipment to use to how fine to mill the flours to what variety of wheat to use. And there are lots of options, so if you’re wanting to get started in this, you will need someone with some experience to take your hand and help you through.

Once you get the hang of milling your own flour, he leads you to the next step—using that beautiful fresh flour to make the most flavorful breads, like a yeasted loaf, yeasted ciabatta, sourdough durum loaf, baguettes, potatoes rolls, bagels, and rye bread. He also offers up recipes for several different types of pastas as well as several for sauces and a variety of pizza recipes complete with topping ideas. And when you want something a little sweeter, there are recipes for sponge cake, carrot cake, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, scones, and croissants.

Because these recipes are made with freshly milled flours, they are not for beginning cooks. It takes some skill, experience, and patience to understand these recipes and create successful food with them. But for those wanting to take on this challenge, Flour Lab is the perfect place to start educating yourself to mill and use fresh flours.

This is a genuinely beautiful book. The photography is breath-taking, particularly through the recipes, where many steps are demonstrated by Leonti himself. But for me, someone who doesn’t have a lot of knowledge about milling flour, I missed having those beautiful photos showing the act of milling, showing the wheatberries before milling, some of the varieties of wheat that are available, and the difference between a coarsely milled flour and a finely milled flour, just as they finish. I would have loved to see that. But I am now fascinated by the process, and I can’t wait to learn more about fresh flour and how it’s used by chefs and by brewers.

Flour Lab is a beautiful introduction to creating and using freshly milled flours. As Leonti says, it’s “better for your health, the environment, and flavor,” and who can resist a promise like that?

[Gebo · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book says it’s the go to guide on making flour at home. Several people told me how great it is and that it’s so helpful for milling your own grains—even gluten free ones. Meanwhile, the book is ENTIRELY about wheat varieties making it basically meaningless for me as I have a wheat allergy. He has 1/4 of a page about how to make the world’s crappiest rice flour that’s pointless unless you’re going make rice flour the consistency of sugar!

Could have covered beans, rice, quinoa, oats, lentils, etc. but… not a single one. So if you wanna know what mill this guy recommends for anything else — he doesn’t and he says run your rice through a coffee grinder.

He had an amazing opportunity here to delve deeply into a wide variety of grains and to make the book holistic and actually helpful for more than a tiny group of people, but managed to make another book for bougie housewives and people with a lot of money and free time.

This could have been AN AMAZING BOOK, but it’s not. Seriously, if you’ve made bread before, this book adds very little other than telling you to get a stone ground mill and that soft wheat can be milled faster because you can separate the plates more. Thanks for nothing—huge waste of my time to read this and learned an important lesson to skim the index rather than just leaping in.

[Tricia Buzzelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flour Lab is a really infromative reads on each type of flour and how it should be used. It is a widespread belief that flour is flour and this book does a good job of setting that straight. The photographs of each preparation of flour also hopefully help people realize why it is so important to pay attention to this book and learn the different types of flour and how much of a science making bread really is. I would recommend this book to people who have a good understanding of cooking and are ready to break into the world of bread. Thanks for the free book @clarksonpotter, I am happy to have the resource in my library.

[Kirk Dobihal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. Coming from New Haven I was pleased to see the inclusion of Pepe's and Sally's apizza. However the classic clam pizza was made with clams in their shells - wrinkled my furrows, as the recipes for pizza were sans Margherita - again further wrinkled my furrows. Also the inclusion of fresh cake yeast as opposed to instant active dry yeast dropped my rating to 4 stars.

[Mckinley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chris Bianco is the guy for pizza dough.

[Tiffany T · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a much more hardcore book about milling your own flour and baking than I anticipated. I only read the flour lab title at first and assumed it was a baking cookbook: it's much more hands on in flour production than that and measures everything by weight instead of cups. It's an interesting read.