The two foods that I can barely keep up with my family's consumption right now are homemade soup and homemade bread. I've been doing what I can to push other grain consumption, such as making more rice and baking batches of granola. Yet, bread still seems to be a favorite around these parts.
While I still have about 15 pounds of white flour (all-purpose flour made from wheat), I've been watching our family's use and have determined that we need to slow down on the white flour consumption. You all know that I bake just about every baked good that my family consumes, from cakes and pies, to breads and tortillas. In the past couple of weeks, we seem to have had a lot of white flour-only baked goods, which began to drain our supply of that flour.
When I bake yeasted bread, I use about a half and half (white and whole wheat) blend of flours. I had a thought the other day to turn some of my almost 25 pounds of rolled oats into flour, to use as a substitute for part of the white flour in making bread. Yeasted bread still needs some of the glutinous flours, so an all-oat bread would be out of the question for me. But I thought I could still use half whole wheat flour, then a quarter oat flour and a quarter of the white flour and turn out a loaf that my family would enjoy. (Homemade 100% whole wheat loaves are not as appreciated by my clan.)
I tried this out on a single, large loaf of French bread on Friday. It turned out great!
To make oat flour, I processed regular rolled oats in my food processor, much like I would for making instant oatmeal, only pulsing until it looked like a fine meal.
I have the rest of what I processed stored in a container. I'll make a full baking of bread (4 loaves) this afternoon and use this 1/4, 1/4, 1/2 formula for the flours in the dough.
In the long run, substituting oat flour for all-purpose flour would be more expensive than simply using all-purpose flour. However, for my current circumstances of not wanting to venture out to stores while still having a lot of rolled oats that could be used, this is a good solution. It will enable me to stretch out our supply of AP flour for several extra weeks. And my family still gets lots and lots of homemade bread.
By the way, oat flour also makes great scones and muffins.
