Flour submenu: Flour Home | Growing the Wheat | Grinding the Grain | Sorting the Flour | Best Uses of the Flour | Bread Recipes

Old Stone Mill Stone Ground Flour

Note 1: we generally only produce Whole Wheat Flour (flour straight from the stones). The bolter, which is used to produce fine flour, is only run on special occasions when we have sufficient volunteers available. So we DO NOT normally have white fine flour available.

Note 2: Aged Flour Makes Better Bread: Newly ground flour, right off the millstones, does not make good bread. Flour needs to be aged, at least a week and ideally a month or more. Ageing allows the proteins (gluten) in the flour to become stronger which creates a more elastic dough. Aged flour has higher water absorption, better mixing tolerance, and produces bread with greater loaf volume and a better consistency. Fresh flour produces crumbly bread.

Note 3: Our flour is only available for sale when the mill is open, generally mid-May to Labour Day. We also usually do a grind on special event day outside our main operating season, during Delta's Maple Syrup Festival and Delta's Harvest Festival. Our miller, who is also our farmer, may have some flour available in the off season, he stone grinds his own on his farm. See: www.ironwoodorganics.ca


Kids with Old Stone Mill Flour Flour from the Old Stone Mill is extremely high quality, stone ground from Red Fife wheat, a heritage wheat developed in Ontario.

The sale of flour helps us fund the operation of the Old Stone Mill, which is owned by the non-profit Delta Mill Society, a group of dedicated volunteers.

We are grinding grain into flour much as it was done when the mill was first opened over 200 years ago.

We normally only have Whole Grain Flour available for sale - this is the grind directly from the stones. Sometimes, if we have enough volunteer support, we operate the bolter which sorts the flour by gravity and screening, allowing us to produce Fine flour.

Old Stone Mill Flour ingredient list: flour (that's it!)
(see below for what you'll find in commercially processed flours)

On this page you can discover:
  • where the wheat we grind comes from and how it was grown,
  • how our grain is ground,
  • how our flour is classified into grades, and
  • suggested best uses for each grade of flour.

Our Wheat
Good flour comes from good wheat and we use only the best, Red Fife wheat. Red Fife was first grown by David Fife in Otonabee, Ontario in 1842. It is a hard spring wheat, high in protein (gluten) and lower in starch. This makes it an ideal bread making wheat.

Grinding the Grain
We grind the Red Fife wheat using millstones that are over 200 years old. There is both a science and an art to stone grinding using heritage equipment and we've brought both to the Old Stone Mill. Our stone grinding doesn't heat the grain and hence produces a very high quality flour. Click here for more details ...

Flour Grades
When we use the bolter, flour from the grind is carried by elevator to the second floor of the Old Stone Mill where it enters the bolter, in our case, a bolter built in the late 1700s. The bolter is 14 feet (4.3 m) long with a set of spinning screens. The finest flour (superfine and fine), which is white in colour, comes out first. Gravity moves the heavier, coarser flour along the bolter and the next grade, the middlings, come out and then finally, the bran. Click here for more details ...

Dough Rising Time-Lapse
A quick (35 sec) view of bread dough rising
Best Uses
Our Fine flour, which is the fine/superfine sorting from the bolter, is an ideal bread making flour. It shouldn't be confused with refined white flour from a supermarket - our Fine flour creates a bread with colour and flavour. We also do grinding runs without the bolter, resulting in an unsorted Whole Grain flour. All grades have their uses in baking. Click here for more details ...

Bread Recipes
Our flour is ideal for bread making and we've included a few recipes from expert bread maker Louise Richards to get you started. Click here for more details ...

Ingredients
Our flour consists of one ingredient, flour (that's it!). If you look at a bag of commercial flour you'll see other ingredients including amylase, xylanase, mononitrate, l-cysteine hydrochloride and azodicarbonamide. We don't include any of those in Old Stone Mill Flour. Our natural flour does require a bit of care - store it in a cool, dry place and for long term storage (longer than 2-3 months), put the flour, in a sealed container, in the freezer.

Have a look at our Photo & Video Gallery to see photos and videos of grain being ground into flour.




Flour submenu: Flour Home | Growing the Wheat | Grinding the Grain | Sorting the Flour | Best Uses of the Flour | Bread Recipes


The Delta Mill Society   The Delta Mill Society
Box 172, Delta, Ontario K0E 1G0
Tel: 613-928-2584 (office)
Email: info@deltamill.org
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