Buying Whole Grain Wheat

Whole wheat berries: Choose from hard red or hard white wheat, both ideal for bread making. Breads made with hard red and hard white wheats will be very similar; the main difference is that red wheat produces a fuller, heartier flavor, and the bread will have a slightly darker color. Many of our customers prefer the whole grain white wheat, and a good number prefer the red — it's a matter of taste. If you're just starting out with whole grain baking and don't know how to pick, we suggest starting with hard white wheat. Note: Don't confuse "whole grain white wheat" with store-bought "white flour"! White wheat is called "white" just because it's slightly lighter-colored than "red" wheat; in fact, both are shades of reddish-brown. Store-bought white flour, on the other hand, is essentially nothing more than the endosperm (energy-producing carbohydrate) part of the kernel, with nearly everything nutritious removed in the interest of indefinite after-milling shelf life... which benefits huge commercial millers, at the expense of your health and the character of your food.

Ideal for baking: Our grain is triple-cleaned. It's also been tested, in the most meaningful way possible: By baking bread with it. You can depend on wheat from Pleasant Hill Grain to make bread and other baked goods that rise well, taste wonderful, and are packed with wholesome, natural nutrition! For those who may want to sprout some grain, our grain is fully sproutable.

Convenient & safe storage: Our grain comes in six-gallon buckets (or pails... another word for the same container), containing 45 lbs. net weight of grain. When you store grain at home, it needs to be protected in a couple of ways. First, it needs to be protected from a variety of little critters who'd like to get to it before you do. Weevils, for example. And isn't this interesting: Chances are you've never seen weevils in the white bread or crackers you bought from the store. That's because weevils put no stock in media campaigns from white-flour milling conglomerates; rather, they know what's good for them, and they'd come after your grain from miles around if you let them. And mice have good nutritional judgment, too. Not that there's ever been a mouse in your house, but if there was... you wouldn't want it having access to your grain. Secondly, grain needs to be kept dry. The grain we sell is all dried to a very low moisture level that's optimal for storage and baking and guarantees that you get the most grain for your money. You need to protect your grain from picking up excessive additional moisture, which can be drawn from the atmosphere. The buckets our grain comes in provide full protection against storage risks. They have airtight gasket-sealed lids, and oxygen absorber packets that remove the oxygen from the air in the bucket after we put the lid on. The O2 absorbers leave an atmosphere of nitrogen in the bucket (because air is mainly oxygen and nitrogen.) Our buckets safely lock out pests, and biological processes are put "on hold" in the nitrogen atmosphere, so your grain enjoys complete peace and quiet until you want to use it.

Extended storage option: Our normal regular nitrogen-sealed buckets provide completely safe, multi-month storage. If you want to guarantee safe storage for your grain even for many, many years, we also offer the same grain in "Super Pails." A Super Pail is like a regular bucket, except that the grain inside is also sealed inside a Mylar bag. The Mylar has a thin, flexible layer of metal. Over a very long period of time, oxygen and moisture can migrate through even the thick wall of a quality plastic bucket. For many-year storage, Mylar's metal layer provides a barrier to any oxygen and moisture migration. Grain in nitrogen-sealed, Mylar-lined Super Pails is prepared for decades of worry-free storage.

Simple ordering: The cost of shipping is included in the cost of each bucket of grain, in the tables below. Because shipping cost varies with distance, grain price varies depending on where it's being shipped to. There are three tables below, each showing exactly the same products, but at somewhat different prices depending on where you want us to ship it to. Just find the table that lists your ship-to state, and use the Buy Buttons in that table to add grain to your shopping cart.

If you don't yet have a grain mill to turn your grain into flour, or want to upgrade to a modern & convenient high-speed mill, Pleasant Hill Grain offers the world's best. You can see them on our home page: Grain Mills. (From where that link takes you, scroll down the page for a variety of mills.) We also have quality baking ingredients and special bakeware.

To Zone #1: Order from this table if you want your grain shipped to one of these states: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. (For local-pickup customers here in Nebraska, your picked-up cost will be $20 off each unit price in this table.)

To Zone #2: Order from this table if you want your grain shipped to one of these states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, Washington State, Wash. D.C., West Virginia, and Wyoming.

To Zone #3: Order from this table if you want your grain shipped to one of these states: Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Seeing the Story: Want to show your family and friends just what they're losing when they eat food made with processed "white flour"? They say a picture's worth a thousand words, and we hope this demo set will help open more eyes to the reality of the situation. The first of the six vials in this set contains whole wheat kernels, recognized throughout history as the "staff of life." At the opposite end is bleached white flour... as gleaming and nutritionless as industrial science can make it.

The four middle vials showcase the nutritional riches that today's commercial millers sacrifice on the altar of unlimited shelf life: The bran, middlings, wheat germ, and wheat germ oil, where virtually all the goodness of the whole grain resides. None of that goodness remains in pathetic commercial "white flour" — but you can have it all, by making your own fresh flour from whole grains with a fast, convenient, modern grain mill in your home kitchen. You, and everyone you bake for, will soon wonder what you ever saw in "styro bread"!