Every month or so I go to my flour dealer to get a 10kg bag of wheat. I usually buy red winter wheat, because it has a high protein content, and this is helpful to me when I bake sourdough — high protein makes it easier to get a bread with volume and high rise.
Flour doesn’t store real well, but (as long as they are kept dry and relatively cool) wheat kernels do. I have a countertop stone mill that I use to make flour when I need it. This means that the flour I get uses all the nutritious yumminess of the kernels — the endosperm, the germ, and the bran — and thus I can bake our sourdough bread according to the only principals that make common sense.
Couldn’t I just get a bag of wholemeal flour in the grocery store and leave it at that? Or maybe even buy our loaves of bread from a baker? Yes, I could. (Actually, technically I couldn’t buy it from a baker, because we don’t have a bakery nearby who sell this type of bread … but that’s a separate train of thoughts.) Well, life is only what we make it, and it’s the little things that matter. I do it this way because it gives me chance to occasionally enjoy an individual manifestation of my life … without which I’m somewhat lost.
And also, of course, the bread I bake this way tastes especially good, not to say exceptional.