July 10, 2018 - 9:06am
lowering temperature of milled flour
I love my new Mockmill 100, but, when I mill flour at a very fine grind, it's temperature can register as high as 116F, which I've read is high enough to deactivate some enzymes and maybe cause other problems. I don't always need a really fine grind, but it can be useful in the quest for light-textured 100% whole wheat flour.
So I tried refrigerating the grain before grinding it, and the temp registered 88F. So, problem solved, I think? Does anyone know of any reason why this would not solve the problem, but create others, instead?
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I freeze my wheat before grinding. Just make sure you grind right out of the refrig/freezer so no water condenses on it before grinding as it warms up.
I definitely don't want wet grain gumming up the mill.
in flour. You can always cut the amount you do at any one time. I only bake 1 loaf a week so it isn't a problem for me when only doing 500 g max at a time.
Just to second clazar's post, I put some berries in the freezer ( or fridge, can't remember ) then milled them and must have left them out so long that moisture condensed, the burrs got jammed up , and burned out the motor on a mill . In part that is because I kept the mill in the garage, turned it on, and went back into the house and checked back much later. I suggest that you stay by the mill the first few minutes and make sure everything sounds right.
I'll have to agree with dabrownman based on my admittedly limited experience. In fact I think that within a reasonable range of temperatures, shy of breaking down enzymes, flour 'hot' from the mill seems to accelerate the reactions and activities that I need to make a loaf. I'm using stone burrs instead of steel so flour temp isn't near a critical point. High speed steel burrs might be a different story.
My Wondermil has steel burrs and the newly milled flour can be as high as 130F if I don't chill the berries first. That is just too high. "Warm" from the mill will promote a warmer dough temp., but hot flour will cause problems.
I also have a Mockmill 200 (with stones) that attaches to my Kitchenaid and I really like it a lot. It is smaller and really designed so the baker mills just enough for immediate use on 1-4 loaves. It is definitely not designed for large batch milling.
Have fun!
But I expect royalties ;)
I wonder if there was a way to chill the chamber where the grain is ground or pass chilled air through it? So either turning it into a mini fridge or a mini air conditioning unit.
If I were you I wouldn't spend any time 'loafing' around; I'd run and get a patent right away. ; ) 'Course the problem might arise when you passed chilled air through finely ground flour. That would produce a highly explosive mixture entirely unsuitable for an environment where open flame or a spark was possible. A chilled chamber for the grain probably wouldn't work well because of the time the grain would spend in it. And then there'd be the problem of the insulative effect of the air in the interstitial spaces. Perhaps using a closed spiral chute similar to the worm on a still that offered a chilled surface might work. It would need to have a substantial length to assure that the flour remained in contact with a cooled surface long enough to transfer the accumulated heat. That would of course be solved by using a very convoluted design perhaps modeled on the principle of the small intestine. You'd probably only need about 23 square feet of counter space for the unit. I'm checking now to see if Rube Goldberg already has a patent.
Who's Rube Goldberg? If you're under 50 you'll have to google him.
"You'd probably only need about 23 square feet of counter space for the unit"
I'm working on the design :)
I've heard of Rube Goldberg but still needed to Google him.
Back to the drawing board.
For what it's worth (darned little I suppose but nonetheless....) I just milled 400g of hard red wheat with my Mockmill KA accessory on the tightest setting for the stones. I ran the mixer at its highest speed and I kept taking the temperature of the flour with the mill running. The highest reading I found on the interior of the flour was 106f. I don't believe that that temp would be problematic. There isn't enough science in this to earn a Nobel Prize or even Honorable Mention in a grade school science fair, but it is an attempt at quantification. My guess, no, make that hypothesis is that high speed steel burrs or micronizers generate more heat than composition stones do at the moderate speeds produced by hand grinding or their use as attachments on mixers. At some point you make a choice (inadvertently perhaps) between speed and product temperature. Other factors would include the diameter of the burrs and the amount of grain milled. Now a question or two for the experts: Is there a time factor involved in the destruction of the enzymes? For example would adding cooled hydration to hot milled flour minimize the damage to enzymes?