If you have successfully convinced your husband to make the investment, then congrats!! If you are still working on him, then just think about whether or not you'd spend $500-$600 for everyone in your family to have a blast of serious vitamins, minerals and fiber in their diet every day?
In so many ways, this has really simplified my life and grocery shopping. I used to buy a ton of "boxed" and "processed" frozen waffles, cereals, cereal bars, and other store bought pre-packaged, nutrition-less foods. Since I purchase most of my bread making and baking supplies in bulk, I always seem to have everything I need on hand and my grocery bill has actually gone down. If your husband is still on the fence, remind him of what the Vitamin E will do to his hairline and he'll be sold! And ladies, wait until you see what it does to your fingernails!!
If you haven't already, please read my first post on how I got started to learn more background.
The first thing you need to purchase in order to mill grains into a flour is a good, reliable electric mill. Either of these two options below are great choices and you can purchase both of them from Bread Beckers.
Grain Mills:
1. Nutrimill Grain Mill: $259 and if you order from Bread Beckers, it includes free shipping.
2. WonderMill Grain Mill: $259 and it also includes free shipping through Bread Beckers.
*I did want to point out that in addition to using your mill to grind grains into flour, you can also grind beans for a bean flour to add to soups, etc. I haven't really experimented in this area, but will post recipes and instructions when I do!
Bread Machine:
1. Zojirushi 2lb. Home Bread Bakery: $229.95 and it also includes free shipping through Bread Beckers.
Some people start off with the grain mill to start making muffins, pancakes, etc. and then get the Zoji bread machine later on. You can certainly make bread the old-fashion way with out the Zoji, however, I knew I would never do that and so I needed a machine that would allow me to dump all the ingredients in it in less than 5 minutes and then hit start and let it do the rest of the work. The Zoji is great with working with the whole grain flours and makes a beautiful 2 lb. loaf of bread in about 2 1/2 hours!
Bread Beckers Recipe Collection:
I've include several of my favorite recipes with slight adaptions here on this blog, however, for several more ideas, you should definitely purchase this cookbook for $6 from Bread Beckers.
Supplies:
Take a look at the "Supplies" tab here to view all required supplies for baking breads, muffins, etc.
Other Resources:
There is a 4 hour long webcast you can view from a Bread Becker's class entitled "Getting Started".
