Grinding Your Own Grain

If you’ve never eaten food made from freshly ground grain, you’ve never realized how flat and insipid the flour you’re used to really tastes. You can home-grind all the grains, including rye, wheat, corn, rice, barley, and oats, as well as soybeans, chestnuts, peanuts, lentils, and dried peas to make a variety of flours. In the old days you took your grain to a mill and had the miller grind it. For payment, old-time law stipulated that the miller was entitled to one-tenth part of what he ground — except for corn, in which case the cut was one-seventh. That’s because corn is the hardest of all grains to grind. When you’re shopping, keep in mind that some mills can handle anything but corn. The basic tip is to make sure your food is dry before you put it through.

Storing Home-Ground Flour

Don't make all your grain into flour at once. Whole-grain cornmeal or wheat flour or any other flour ground at home loses quality— flavor and vitamins — almost literally every hour it waits between the grinding and the baking. Home-ground flour and cornmeal has a higher lipid (oil) content and is not degerminated or bleached. It’s therefore better food for you and any other form of life, so it won’t keep like store bought flour — unless you freeze it. As soon as your grain is ground, the oxidation processes begin; ultimately they will turn the fat in it rancid. Rancid fat is not deadly poisonous; it’s merely slightly harmful to eat and unpleasant to taste. Weevils and other insects are also more inclined to get into and be a noxious presence in flour than whole grain. Home-ground flour can also absorb odor and dampness, so it’s best to store it in an airtight container — for a small quantity, a glass jar; for large quantities, one of the 5-gal. metal or plastic cans that you can buy with fitted lids. Best of all is to grind the flour just before using it. If you plan to keep it more than a week, freeze it!

Buying Your Grinder

Shop around, comparing prices and available models.  Because there is such a confusing array of choices, tell the grinder salesperson you size of household; what grain or seeds you plan to grind, shell or crush for oil; and if you'll also be grinding feed for livestock, how many and what kind.  Health food stores or co-ops sometimes have grinders for sale, but they're not as likely to be able to give you expert advice.  Grinders are now available that can operate either by hand or by electricity at the flip of a switch.

Nonelectric Grinders

Mortar and Pestle

You can use a mortar made of a hollowed block of wood, with a heavy chunk of wood for a pestle, but stone works better. Find a flat, smooth rock with a center depression large enough to grind on and a smooth rock to grind with.

Hand-Cranked Models

A typical home grain grinder sets on a tabletop. There is usually a large screw clamp to provide firm attachment to a bench or table while you are grinding. The hand models work as long as you have the strength and will to turn the crank. Hand grinders come in various sizes. The Family Grain Mill, made in Germany, provides the best-quality flour of any of the grinders— bread quality with only one grinding! It is not too hard to turn and is reasonably priced (about $130). With the small, bargain hand grinders, it is hard work to get grain fine enough so as to not have chunks in it. The worst of the manual grinders produces a “fine meal” rather than a “flour” on the first grind. In order to get a flour grind, you have to crank very hard and put it through more than once. Then sift out the “grits” and put through again, and so on until you are satisfied with your flour. Feed the grits to your livestock, or cook for cereal.

Powered Grinding

Electric grinding is easy and quick, and blenders are easy to buy. They will work to grind a small amount of grain at any one time, such as the grain for your day’s cooking needs. But grinding is hard on blender blades, and they can’t handle bulk jobs. In most commercial mills today, flour is made by crushing the grain between a series of rollers, much like a wringer washing machine. The expensive electric models for home use can put out around 10 to 16 lb. of flour per hour, depending on size, and cost several hundred dollars. They are kitchen appliances. You plug one in and pour your grain in the hopper, and it grinds your baking flour. One or two quarts of grain at a time is about right for a small family.

Stone Mill

“Stone grinding” means that the grain is reduced to flour texture by rubbing against a stone surface in a manner similar to the old-style water-powered gristmills. Stone wheel mills, whether electric- or hand-powered, cannot be used for soybeans because of the oil from the beans, but they will produce a fine flour. Incidentally, the more a grinder grinds, the better job it does, because the stones grind themselves into a better and better fit.

Burr Mill

This type of mill crushes the grain between a stationary heavy wheel and a revolving one. These are good for people who want to grind feed for livestock as well as their own meal and flour. A burr mill grinds finer than a hand-cranked household mill, although you may need to

run it through more than once — maybe 3 times for baking flour. A burr mill is also the answer for folks who want to grind flour in larger quantities than household mills can handle. The drawback of a burr mill is that it grinds any grain fine but will not grind unthreshed grain-straw combinations. Incidentally, don’t run the burrs on empty. It wears them out faster.

Roller Mill

You can buy an attachment for some household mills that will make rolled oats, wheat, or rye flakes ($99 attachment for the Family Grain Mill). Or get the Marga Grain Roller/Flaker, which has three hardened steel rollers and can be adjusted to make different grades of either flour or flakes, $70 from the Urban Homemaker (see “Buying Your Grinder” below). A roller-type mill is the best for rolling and flaking grains, but it’s not good for making flours. They are less expensive than hammer mills and require less power. They work by mashing the grain between two clothes-wringer-type rollers. You can set a roller mill to hull, crack, and grind grain. The grain will be quite fine, but not fine enough for baking. A good roller mill with crusher rollers can chop corn or grain on the stalk, wet or dry, into silage. A roller mill is what you need if you want to grow one of the grains that doesn’t thresh clean and must be dehulled after threshing and before grinding (such as oats or barley).

Hammer Mill

Hammer mills do big grinding jobs. They also use a lot of electricity and cost a lot. The hammer mill basically grinds anything. You can put whole grain right on the stalk into a hammer mill, and it will turn out a fine livestock feed that includes roughage and avoids threshing. You can mix the feed beforehand and then mill it, and grind corn on the cob. In some cases you can adjust these grinders to make cornmeal, too, but usually a hammer mill

always lets some coarser material through and won’t make a baking-quality flour.

[Adapted from the "Grinding Your Grain" section of Chapter 3: Grasses, Grains, & Canes. Other topics include: Cereal, Fighting Pests in Grain, and growing grains. 

A Culinary Revival!

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN 

We are in the midst of a contemporary revival of almost-lost kitchen arts coupled with a newfound respect for food integrity and healthful living. In a welcome departure from our recent history of fast, global, and often anonymous food, America is developing a palate and a passion for fresh, seasonal fare as well as a growing respect for the farmers and artisan craftspeople who work so hard to produce it.

Until fairly recently (certainly within the past couple of generations) families harvested crops in the fall and stored enough food to get them through until the next harvest. They were frugal by necessity; nothing was allowed to go to waste. A routine part of housekeeping involved mastering a battery of various preserving skills that customarily were passed from generation to generation.

These days we have strawberries in December, oranges throughout the year, and goods from around the world shipped to the shelves of the grocery store. We have access to a diet rich in variety and seemingly independent of geographic or seasonal boundaries. However, preservatives and other additives that lengthen shelf life and allow foods to withstand the rigors of world travel are being held responsible for more and more health issues, and a quickly expanding national waistline proves that more is not always better. Paired with soaring food costs we find ourselves helplessly dependent on a food web completely outside our control.

More and more of us are digging in to discover regional foods and farmers markets, eagerly anticipating the shifting bounty at local u-pick stands. We're learning a new calendar of seasonal crops and planning our meals-and gardens-to reflect this awareness. There is a heartfelt satisfaction in the kitchen of a gardening household when homegrown food becomes a delicious meal on the table. Not only are you producing clean, healthy food free of preservatives and toxins, but the savings in your food budget can be generous, and you're receiving maximum value in nutrition and health. And the flavors-oh my!

BE A PART OF A CULINARY REVIVAL.  Re-learn a not-lost art with Canning & Preserving Your Own Harvest by Carla Emery & Lorene Forkner.

Carla Emery first started compiling The Encyclopedia of Country Living in 1974 and continued to improve, refine, and update it through ten editions. She traveled the country, enthusiastically teaching the skills for living independently off the land—finding your place in the country, planning and planting a garden, raising animals, living the self-sufficient life. Carla passed away in 2005, but the legacy she created with The Encyclopedia of Country Living lives on.

In 2008, Sasquatch Books celebrated the 30th anniversary of Carla's masterwork with the publication of the 10th edition of The Encyclopedia of Country Living. Interest in the wisdom, skills and advice from Carla's book has never been higher. Here at Sasquatch Books, we are pleased to launch this blog featuring excerpts and tidbits from this amazing manual of country living skills. We hope that it may become a home base for Carla's book on the web and grow into a community of like-minded folks sharing country living wisdom around the world.