I don't have to pay a lot for white flour but a 5 pound bag of whole wheat flour costs 3 or 4 dollars at supermarkets near me that have it and none of them have rye flour. There are also a few other kinds of flour at even higher rates at a large supermarket whose name I won't disclose but which I like to refer to as "Yuppie Heaven". I'd like to find alternatives that are cheaper and which offer more diversity.
One possibility is to order flour on the web. I only found one place that does that so far and it specializes in Indian products. Another possibility is to grind my own flour in some way. Here are a few examples that come to mind: (1) N.Thornton recommended rice flour for certain purposes. Can I make my own rice flour by the following procedure? Take a coffee grinder (e.g. those little Braun devices for grinding coffee beans) and first grind a little bread in it to clean any coffee residue from it. Then fill it with ordinary grains of rice and grind them to a powder. (2) Similarly, I could grind barley, although I would probably want to wash the talc off them and dry them first. (3) I vaguely remember that one can make flour out of acorns, but one needs to do something first to leach some unpleasant chemical out of them. (4) I suppose one can do the same with chestnuts, but I'm not sure that all varieties of chestnuts one finds on the ground are suitable. I have an even vaguer recollection of there being two main kinds of chestnut in France and that they are not both suitable, but my memory could be misleading me on that point. (5) According to the book, Unmentionable Cuisine, one can grind up dried grasshoppers and locusts to make a kind of flour. I don't know how one uses that kind of flour differently from flour made from grains. (6) In a similar spirit, I've heard of fish flour. I've seen dried fish on sale in the supermarket, probably cod. I don't know if one simply grinds it up or if there is something else one has to do first. I think I've also seen dried shrimp and maybe one can grind it to. I think that the batter is deep fried and used in some Chinese restaurants to make a kind of chip for a snack. (7) There are all kinds of dried foods. Can one grind up practically any of them to make a kind of flour? Dried mushrooms, dried squid, dried beans, etc. or is there some quality that a powder has to have to count as a "flour"?
Ignorantly, Allan Adler snipped-for-privacy@zurich.ai.mit.edu
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