One of the recipes in Neel and Pugh’s The Food and Feasts of Jesus calls for either Bob’s Red Mill 10 Grain Flour mix or a homemade 10 grain mix.

I had never made a flour mix, but I do have lots of grains laying around to use.

You might be surprised at how many grains you have at your house.  You already have a five-grain mix if you have oatmeal, corn meal, quinoa, couscous and wild or brown rice.

I used oatmeal, corn meal, wild rice, spelt flakes, quinoa flakes, flaxseed meal, rye flour, barley, and two kinds of wheat berries.

Other grains you could try are: amaranth, bulghur, sorghum, millet and buckwheat.  You could even add other wheat products such as wheat bran or wheat germ.  Since I was already using whole wheat berries I decided to skip those even though I do have them.

Since you are using unprocessed whole grains, they contain fat that goes rancid if not used immediately or stored properly.  If you can’t use them up right away, store them in a plastic bag in the freezer.

I needed 1.5 cups of flour, which comes to 24 tablespoons.  I added two tablespoons of each type of grain I had, which magically came to about the right amount after grinding.

I ground about 4 tablespoons of grains at a time until they were all about the texture of cornmeal.  The flaxmeal, cornmeal and rye flour were added directly to the mix without grinding because they didn’t need to be any finer.  As long as the grains are about the size of couscous, you should be fine.

I used 1.5 cups of my whole grain mix with my starter, 2 cups of water, and 3.5 cups of all-purpose flour.  Be aware that you can’t use the grain mix to replace all of the flour in a recipe, you can replace 1/4 to 1/3 of the flour and still get a nice gluten development along with all the extra flavor of your grain mix.

I can’t wait to see how it turns out!  (I did end up making it; results are here) I will definitely be making this 10-grain flour mix again.