flourgrainsmilling
I'm in Argentina here I cannot fing buckwheat flour so I bought instead buckwheat grain and I want to
mill it to get flour….
but I don't arrive to find a tradicional Mill (at a cheap price)
I want to know if with a machine like this cofee mill I could get good flour?
You're very correct the grinders are pretty pricey. I believe we paid about $300 for ours.
There are a few good reasons for me to have a grinder. Whether they are good reasons for you is your call.
1- I can grind whatever I want. Right now I am using hard white wheat. Unbleached, hard, white wheat flour is more expensive than your run-of-the-mill flour and comes in annoyingly small bags. I also grind beans, quinoa, oats, etc.
2- I can control the fineness of the grind. This is a minor thing but it is nice for me to be able to experiment with the texture of the product. In practice I usually leave it on the same setting but it is finer than the flour I can purchase.
3- Wheat flour is very perishable. I go through a fair bit of flour. As much as 200 oz in a heavy week. In order to have enough wheat flour on hand for a couple weeks it would have to live in the freezer. I don't want to waste that much freezer space. Whole wheat berries last almost indefinitely.
4- I like the flavor better. It tastes fresher and more nutty. This may be imagined- I haven't done any double blind tests. I should do that.
5- Cost- I had to do some of the maths as I don't usually pay a lot of attention to this. King Arthur white wheat flour costs approximately $1.00 a lbs.
I buy 25lbs bags of bulk white wheat for $12-$15 or $0.50-$0.60 a pound. If I use around 10 lbs of flour a week (usually a little less, it varies) I am saving about $5 a week. If you don't have access to wheat that cheap or don't make that much bread then of course the savings will be less.
As for nutrition- I read all the time that the nutrients in whole wheat flour degrade very quickly. I'm not a chemist but those results seem plausible to me based on how quickly the flour itself degrades in quality.
There has been quite a bit of confusion here concerning maida (which can be labeled all-purpose, especially in India). The top answer on the question that you linked to was actually incorrect. It has been fixed. Maida is actually a very low protein flour, much like what would be called cake flour in the US. I suspect and would appreciate if you can confirm that your use of the term "all-purpose flour" stems from the Indian use of the term, not that your recipes call for what Americans would call "all-purpose flour".
In answer to your question, yes, you can substitute what you know as white flour and what I know as all-purpose flour (`10.5% protein) for maida by replacing some of the white flour with cornstarch or potato starch. The best reference I could could find for the percentage of protein in maida was The Fresh Loaf, they say that, on average, maida contains 7.5% protein. To get from 10.5% protein to 7.5% protein, you would need to "lose" 3 grams of protein per every 100 grams of flour. By replacing 28.6 grams of white flour with potato starch or cornstarch, your mixture would have the the 7.5% protein content of maida. That looks good on paper, but my gut says to split the difference. I'd first try a mixture of 15 grams of potato or corn starch and 85 grams of white flour as a substitute for 100 grams of maida. The use of cornstarch in that way is commonly done in the US with our all purpose flour to emulate our low protein cake flour. cake flour with corn starch
In case the international flour terms aren't complicated enough, I understand that in Israel what is generally called cake flour has added leavening agents, it's like what I would call self-rising flour. Confused yet? I'll repeat here what I said in comments above:
"It's confusing. In India (and therefore also on its exports) maida is sometimes labeled "all-purpose", but it is more like what Americans call cake flour. Israel has its all-purpose, which is less processed than the all-purpose in the US. What is called cake flour in Isreal would be called self-rising flour in the US. What Isreal has that is the closest to what Americans call all-purpose is called white flour."
Best Answer
That's a nice picture of a spinning blade type spice grinder you have there. The good ones will even do whole nutmegs. You can also use it to make limited quantities of powdered sugar, oat flour, wheat flour, buckwheat flour etc. About any non-oily seed may be turned into a powder with that grinder. Trying to make peanut butter is a mistake. It goos up the blades something awful.