White flour has one other advantage over whole wheat flour.  It not only remains free of insect infestation, it doesn’t become stale (meaning rancid).  In the wheat germ (where the embryo resides) there is considerable oil, containing among other things, about the best natural source of vitamin E. This oil is highly unsaturated and once the seed is ground the oil goes rancid in a matter of days.  Whole wheat flour kept on the unrefrigerated shelf of the store is almost certainly rancid.  A lot of its other vitamin content has been oxidized too.  If the wheat flour had flowed directly from the grinder into an airtight sack and from there directly to the freezer, if it had been flash frozen and kept extremely cold, it might have a storage life of some months.  Of course that was not the case.  Maybe you’re lucky and your healthfood store is one of the very few that has its own small-scale flour mill and grinds daily.  Probably not.

How about your baker’s whole wheat bread?  Where does the baker get flour?  From the wholesaler’s or distributor’s warehouse!  In fifty pound kraftpaper sacks!  How much time had elapsed from milling to wholesaler to baker to baking?  The answer has to be in the order of magnitude of weeks.  And it might be months.  Was the flour stored frozen?  Or airtight?  Of course not.

If you want bread made from freshly ground flour you are almost certainly have to grind and bake it yourself.  Is it worth the trouble?  You bet.  Once you’ve tasted real bread you’ll instantly see by comparison what stale, rancid whole wheat flour tastes like.  Freshly ground flour makes bread that can be the staff of life and can enormously upgrade your health—­if the wheat you use is any good.

But before we talk about wheat quality, a more few words of warning.  If you think wheat goes rancid rapidly, rye is even worse.  Rye flour goes bad so fast that when you buy it in the store it usually is the rye equivalent of white wheat flour.  The germ has been removed.  The bag may not say so.  But it probably has.  If you are going to make rye breads, even more reason to grind your own.  Corn meal from the grocery store has usually been degerminated too.  If it hasn’t been, the oil in the seed’s germ has probably gone rancid.

Grinding flour at home is easy these days.  There is an abundance of at-home milling products and no shortage of hype about them.  You’ll find staunch advocates of stone mills.  These produce the finest-textured flour, but are costly.  The sales pitch is that stones grind at low temperature and do not damage the oils (remember the development of rancidity is a function of temperature) or the vitamins, which are also destroyed at high temperature.  This assertion is half true.  If you are going to store your flour it is far better to grind it cool.  However, if you are, as we do, going to immediately bake your flour, what difference does it make if it gets a little warm before baking.  That only accelerates the action of the yeast.