You can easily make your own white flour and wheat bran at home by sifting home milled wheat grains.

How To Make Bran And White Flour At Home

You’ll need:

• wheat grains
• hand or electric grain mill
• stainless steel strainers of different sizes

Directions:

Grind the wheat in a grain mill (don’t use the finest setting) and sift the flour through the strainers.

Usually large strainers have a wide mesh, while the mesh of small strainers is tighter woven. So it’s possible to sift different types of flour: from whole wheat flour to white flour. You can also use a piece of muslin or other open mesh fabric to sift the flour.

Grind and sift just the flour you need for your cake or bread because home milled flour is best used fresh.

The large strainer with a wide mesh produces less bran and flour between whole wheat flour and white flour.

The small strainer with a fine-grid mesh produces more bran and finer flour like all-purpose flour or pastry flour.

What to do with the bran residue: You can eat the wheat bran, use it to make Victorian bran shampoo for thick, soft and glossy hair or make George Washington’s 1750s small beer.

Sifting the flour reminded me of Gustave Courbet’s 1855 painting The Grain Sifters 😀 even if they don’t seem to separate flour from bran but remove stones and chaff from wheat grains.