I should have made this post at the time, but time got away, I changed web hosts, and well…
so back in late 2014 we took are wheat harvest from that year and ground it into flour. Here are a few pictures:
The first photo shows the two pans of wheat I cleaned for grinding. The next two just show the grinder and bowl of flour. We ground about two of these bowls, and with the benefit of posting two years late… I can state that we only finally used all that flour. I used it mostly to supplement into my pancake batter, and other efforts where I needed to thicken it up.
As an aside, the cleaning of the grain was much more difficult than you might think. there was a ton of trash in the originally threshed wheat. My cleaning system needed work back then, and still does for that matter. In order to get the dirt particles out, the chaff, straw, cottonwood seeds, etc… I did the following:
- first I filled a 5 Gallon bucket with water, then dumped my harvest into the bucket.
- Agitated the bucket. the lighter stuff floated, which I skimmed off. the heavier stuff stayed below.
- if the heavier stuff was dirt, then the agitation would solve that into water (dirty brown water).
- I drained the bucket, spread the wheat on a towel, laid another towel on top, then worked horizontally for a bit to “scrub” the wheat.
- I put the wheat back into the bucket, rewashed it, skimmed it, towel dried it.
- I immediately put the wheat into the two pans you see above, then put it into our oven at 200 degrees for 4 hours to dry it. In hindsight I believe I could have done better using 250-300 degree’s instead. I didn’t want to cook it, but in reality since it was getting ground anyway, cooking it should not have hurt it.
- anyway, once dry, I put it into the deep freezer @ -6F and left it for a day, then into the grinder.
The frozen wheat actually ground up better than the room temperature wheat. condensation probably had something to do with it, *shrug* but either way we were able to grind up about 4 cups in total that day. I won’t grind again without a motor attached tho. that was a lot of cranking…
lastly, if you were not aware, if you don’t dry the wheat immediately after washing it, it will more than likely sprout in short order. I’ve seen it swell and germinate in less than a day. at that point, you don’t have wheat flour, but rather have wheat malt. Which is actually just as useful, just for different things… wait till you see green sprouts start, then bake it @ 400 for 2 hours (roast it), stirring it often. it basically turns the starches to sugars, ie malt.
-Tobin