Home Milling Project
I have been considering milling my own grain, especially Rye and WW recently. After looking at the details of the process, I have come to the conclusion that if you want to produce tasteful high quality flour, sifting is necessary. The whisper mill type impact mills shatter the grain and make sifting impractical. Essentially all of the grain is included in the flour since it is processed so finely.
On the other hand the age old milling process using adjustable stone, ceramic stone or stainless burrs allows for grinding to certain sizes and grades. Sifting can then be employed to arrive at the grade desired. I'm thinking about Medium Rye and White Rye in particular. Both of those products seem to be hard to locate in many markets and they also seem to be sensitive to spoiling in a short time.
After talking with Bill Wraith, who is a long time contributer here and is a trustworthy source of intelligent discussions in many areas, I'm confident that I can produce great flour that will help me bake the best tasting rye breads.
Proth5. I'm hoping you are reading this and are seeing a comrade in arms in the march to better home milling.
Suggestions and comments are welcome.
Eric
Comments
After a summer hiatus, my home milling is going back into full production. I am working on the Detmolder rye method right now in my baking and will be sticking with commercial rye flour until I think I have my arms around that, but the wheat bread production is now also back in full swing (ya gotta eat...).
That being said, I am currently doing research on milling rye. What I am finding is you mill rye "about like how you'd mill wheat."
You may have noticed that I have an inordinate about of "mill love" for my Diamant grain mill which is a steel buhr mill. It continues undiminished. For me, there is just nothing bad about that mill (except the price), but I enjoy using muscle power rather than electric power.
I hand sift using plastic classifiers. My finest sifting yields nearly perfectly while flour. I blend back the reserved bran to get high extraction flour.
I have been procrastinating on getting a moisture meter (I'm just plain chronically cheap and hate to part with money) but I really should get one (I cannot describe how finally springing loose the money for a good refractometer has changed my jam and confectionary work - why I went without it all those years I'll never know...). I believe moisture level and the tempering process to be crucial. My initial research seems to indicate that this is true with rye as well.
Glad to welcome another maniac miller to the group. Let me know how I can be of help.
Pat
Hi Pat,
Thanks for taking the bait. Bill said you were as dedicated to the concept as he is and figured you would pop up at the first mention. So you have a hand mill eh. I don't really want to spend for a motor driven mill if I don't have to and at the moment I'm looking at this for improving my rye and whole wheat breads.
Knowing what you have learned what would you recommend for a mill?
Bill gave me the site for the mining screens. He thought I could probably get away with 1 or 2 screens to arrive at light or medium rye. I don't have any experience with any of this so please be direct with me in your suggestions.
Thanks Pat.
Eric
Eric,
I love my Diamant mill. I am not a fitness buff by any means and I can easily mill a couple of pounds in a milling session without knocking myself out. You can take a good look at the Diamant on the Lehman's site www.lehmans.com - they are the only US dealers. (I've never called Lehmans for information - but they have been 100% reliable in all my dealings with them- they seem like good folks...) (Just be careful - their site and their catalogue can be addictive.) Some good points on the Diamant are the burrs for fine through coarse milling and its ability to mill oily grains. It can be motorized. I find that the cast iron flywheel makes hand milling easier. It is beautiful. You must sacrifice a surface to bolt the thing down. In my situation, I need to live with the thing in sight - so I am glad it is beautiful. It is like a work of kitchen art. Have I mentioned that I love it? I do.
But look at the price! (wow, wowwie, wow - I just went to the site and looked and the price is even more fabulous than I remember - exchange rate must be a factor there...) I got mine on eBay, but it is rare that they are listed on eBay and the bidding was cut -throat.
Lehmans does offer their own mill which is less expensive, but doesn't have the cast iron flywheel. I've heard good things about the Country Living grain mill. Homestead products http://www.homestead-products.com/mills-countryliving.htm has some things to say about the comparison of the Diamant vs Country Living.
I can't tell you what is right for you. I love my Diamant (did I mention that?) and knowing what I know now, I would buy it again.
Other posters are correct, the debate of stone vs steel milling on mills of this type is really not valid. The issue is heat. If I am milling very fine and crank very fast, I can heat up the flour - but not by much. The steel burrs served me well when I got a little too agressive with tempering and had to take my mill apart and clean it.
In terms of sieves - I use the lmine 14" plastic classifiers. I have the numbers 20, 30, 50 and 100. I use the 20, 30 and 50. The 100 will produce very fine white flour, but in very small quantities. My final wheat flour for bread baking is ultimately sifted through the #50 and it is a fine, silky flour - actually finer than a commercial whole wheat. My educated guess is that I would use a #50 for the final pass for medium rye flour.
The 14" classifiers sit neatly on top of my "big bowl" and hand sifting is a fairly easy operation. I both shake the sieves and use my hand to push the flour around so it drops in the bowl. It provides a nice break from cranking the mill and really takes little muscle power.
If I were writing up my project budget for home milling - this time I would include a line item for a moisture meter. So you may wish to factor in mill price vs your ability to buy a good grain moisture meter.
Hope all of this is helpful. Let me know of anything else you need.
Pat
Hi Eric:
Check out the benefits of stone-milling: http://eap.mcgill.ca/Publications/EAP35.htm
If nutrition isn't your bent, I've both stone and metal milled, and haven't found an increase or decrease in baking quality with aging stone milled flour like I did flour milled with metal burrs (I emailed Monica Spiller and she verified my observations). Because I have a commercial op, I have a Meadows Mill stone mill, but you can get home size stone mills as well. It might be hard for you to find local wheat or rye flour (not sure of your location), but the berries normally aren't as difficult. The flavor of the grain seems much purer: no rancidity, and I can mill it just the way I like.
I am interested in hearing about these screens. Do you have a link?
SOL
Thanks for that link. I'm about 1/2 way through the article and it's interesting and scary at the same time.
Here is the link to the mining company that you can get sieves. Look on the left side for the button. I think Proth5 uses the plastic body screens that are a little cheaper and shakes them by hand,
http://www.lmine.com/
Eric
Hi Eric and Pat,
I tried to follow everything you and Bwraith talked about, Pat, I really did! But you were so far over my head I could see contrails!
That said, I've been fascinated by the lengths to which you all have gone with milling. I use a hand-crank, but it's metal burr, not stone, due to economic considerations. I don't want to hijack here, but could you tell me anything about affordable stone (hand) mills, or is that an oxymoron?
Hand powered is slow, but I love the flour I get, though anything I don't use immediately is stored in the freezer. I've ground red wheat, spelt, kamut, and rye, and it's all way better than what comes from the store, but I've noticed the biggest difference in the wheat and rye.
edh
I haven't decided yet on stone (ceramic) or steel or powered vs hand crank. I guess I would rather not turn this into an aerobic exercise but from what I hear it doesn't take long to make a few pounds.
Eric
I think I did read the description in Glezer's book, but it didn't really sink in. My mill is a rather low-end little unit that produces tasty but pretty coarse flour. I'd gotten used to it, but after buying some KA WW recently, realized just how coarse mine is, and how very easy it is to handle dough made with the finer stuff!
Someday, when I strike it rich :-), I'd like to upgrade to a higher quality hand-crank, but haven't figured out whether stone or steel is preferable. This is all strictly theoretical at this point of course, but it's so interesting to read about what you all have discovered in your experiments!
BTW Eric, I have to run the flour through my mill 3 times to get it as fine as possible, but doing it that way I take an hour to grind about 7 lbs.
edh
The comments on non-commercial steel milling are interesting. I've read somewhere that in commercial steel mills, the grain can get up to nearly 400 degrees, obviously a reason why they tell us whole grain flour turns rancid quickly: it's probably rancid before it leaves the mill. I do know that my stone mill leaves the flour below 100 degrees; most of the time it feels slightly above room temp. The Nutrimill I had been trying out before left the flour above 100, 120 if memory serves, but again, nowhere near 400. I've had my stone mill only a few months, so I haven't needed to sharpen the stones yet. The idea of doing that makes me nervous. When I was looking for a commercial mill, I did find metal burr ones that could mill a lot more things: seeds, herbs, bones(!). Both my stone mill and the Nutrimill are loud, although the Nutrimill had a higher-pitched whine that really grated on my nerves. I also found the Nutrimill not to be as neat in its operation that it claimed to be. Line things up wrong, and you'll find your kitchen dusted with flour.
SOL