For no reason that I can particularly justify, I would like to be able to grind my own flour at home; without converting my entire house to an industrial mill, what can I do? - What sort of small-scale milling equipment is available to the self-sufficiency freak?
coffee grinder?
Would that grind finely enough, do you think?
You can buy grain mills for home use. Look at this and this. A Google search on ‘grain mill’ brings up a pile of pages.
I’ve looked into doing it before, and you gotta be going through a LOT of flour to make it worthwhile. Even at the head of my bread baking, I couldn’t really justify the expense or the work, especially when high grade flour was cheaply available.
Oh economy would be pretty low on my list of reasons; I can buy plain flour for 9p a bag at Asda.
Bread flour is a little more expensive; say 70p and up, more economical in bulk.
But thanks for the links; that is the sort of equipment I am looking for.
Here’s another good supplier of grain mills, mostly non-electric :Lehman’s
My brother has a Country Living hand mill, and it produces excellent flour. His also has a groove in the wheel so that it could be fairly easily hooked up to a bicycle or other power source.
If you have a KitchenAid stand mixer, they make a grain grinder attachment that fits onto it. We have one, but have never actually used it yet.
I sometimes make whole-grain cereal for Whatsit Jr. and have had good luck just throwing the grains in the blender for a minute or two, but I’m pretty sure that’s not recommended procedure.
That sounds like it would dull the blade quite quickly.
There don’t seem to be as many options machine-wise over here in the UK; I may have to get one shipped over (but damn! it’ll want to run on 110v)
Don’t use a meat grinder to mill grains - I busted the handle off one doing that. I found a low tech and labour intensive method for turning corn (very tough stuff) into corn flour by smashing it inside a pipe.
Get a threaded hollow steel pipe, and a cap for the end. Then get a peice of 1" steel rod, drop 1/4 handfull of grain down the hollow pipe, and start pulverizing it pile-driver style. 20 seconds or less should leave you with nothing but powder. Then unscrew the cap (sometimes the powder gets smashed onto the cap and won’t pour out), sift out any remaining bits, and repeat. It’ll take you 15 minutes to get a cup of flour, but you sure feel like you’ve earned it!