We grind our own flour.
We own the Country Living Grain Mill, which makes very fine flour in one pass. My husband attached a bicycle to it to allow us to grind with our leg muscles instead of our arm muscles. It can also be fitted with an electric motor.
Walton Feed has a review of grinders.
If you have never baked with freshly-ground flour, it's hard to describe the difference in taste. It's as pronounced as the difference between garden-fresh vegetables and canned ones.
Wheat can be bought in bulk and keeps indefinitely. It's dead cheap in bulk, so baking is very frugal when you start with whole wheat berries.
Whole wheat berries can make a nice hot wheat cereal too.
We buy hard white wheat, which grinds to whole wheat bread flour and soft wheat, which grinds to whole wheat cake flour.
Pastry flour is basically a mixture of 3 parts cake flour and 1 part bread flour. This provides enough gluten to hold doughs together, but little enough that they don't become tough.
Mixing 3/4 cake flour and 1/4 bread flour makes pastry flour.
I have recently ordered durum flour, which will grind to semolina for pasta making. We haven't tried this just yet, we currently make pasta from bread flour.
I am discussing whole wheat flours here. Whole wheat flour will go rancid over time, so don't buy it in bulk, just enough for a month or two at a time.
As for white flours, JUST SAY NO! ;)
All-purpose flour is a mixture of half bread flour and half cake flour. It's not quite as satisfactory as buying bread flour and cake flour individually.
The simplest way to buy flour is to buy all-purpose flour, cake flour and gluten.
Add gluten to all-purpose flour to make a bread flour that will produce lighter bread than all-purpose alone.
You can make pastry flour by mixing 2/3 cake flour and 1/3 all-purpose.
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