Spelt anyone?

In an effort to learn more about grains and use more healthy grains since I live in a house of breadhounds, I bought a couple of new flours at an area health food store. They fresh grind all of their flours or you can buy it in bulk yourself and grind your own. That is what my end goal is - to grind my own. But I want to try different grains to determine if that will work for the family. So I bought some spelt, hard red ground ultrafine, and soft white ground ultrafine. We would probably be buying the hard red wheat or soft white wheat in bulk so I wanted to be sure I tried those.

So Friday morning for breakfast after looking at these flours I bought, I went for it! I made my regular 3 cups of flour recipe for buttermilk pancakes but substituted 1/2 c spelt and 1/2 c red whole wheat for 1 c of unbleached white. I knew I had to go gradual for fear of a pancake revolt. So my recipe turned out to be 1/2 c spelt, 1/2 c red whole wheat, 2 c unbleached white flour along with the other ingredients. They tasted great and no texture difference. The kids didn't even notice! Cool! Next time I will go for a higher amount of wheat and spelt. Or I may try kamut or amaranth wheat.

That evening I also modified my pizza dough recipe that is the family favorite which is already 1 1/2 c whole wheat flour and 1 1/2 c white flour. But I put in 1/2 c spelt and 1 c of the hard red wheat in place of the normal King Arthur whole wheat I use. In theory the King Arthur whole wheat should be the same and come from hard red also, but this that I bought at the village market was fresh ground there, so maybe a little better and not so processed? Could be a toss up but being a grain newb I don't know what's what. The pizza came out great and no one again was the wiser. I may be imagining this but the dough was more elastic and chewier which is good....but I could be imagining that. Anyway, nothing went to waste! :-)

So I feel a little more comfortable and more adventurous ready to try some more grains and recipes. Then my next endeavor or question will be if these home mills will produce as nice flour as I can buy from the village market. I have a friend with a similar mill to what we are looking at so she may shed some light for me.