OTish: Quern/Mill stones

[Jethro_uk]

Having recently purchased a lovely little hand grinder for coffee (mmmm ! ) I found myself vaguely wondering how flour milling using stones manages to give you ground flour, and not powdered stone ?

Does the process rely on always having a layer of grain between the stones, or is there more to it ? I know stones were slightly tapered to allow the ground grain to fall to the edges, and there is a groove in one of the stones, but beyond that, never having seen on in use ...

Wiki talks about tentering, but is rather wooly.

Does anyone grind their own grain these days ?

The coffee grinder is a burr-type. Seems coffeescenti consensus is they are better than blade types ....

[Davey]

There are still some working windmills around the country. The basic design of millstones was mentioned in some documentary recently, but I can't remember which one. It might have been one of the Larry Lamb/Maureen Lipman programmes, or possibly the Landmark Trust series.

[Dan S. MacAbre]

I went to Nether Alderley Old Mill a few decades ago. They did produce flour there, but only for sale as souvenirs (I guess you'd have to be a flour enthusiast). They said it wasn't meant for consumption because it /did/ have powdered stone in.

[Peter Parry]

It doesn't. Ancient flour was a mix of flour and grit (as well as many adulterants, millers were the original food fraudsters) . The mixture made into bread produced significant tooth wear and Archaeologists can tell when a particular community adopted mills and millstones by looking for wear on skeletons' teeth.

Modern "stone ground flour" means anything from medieval stuff produced by volunteer mill restorers (complete with grit) to normal metal ground flour which has been passed over a functionally irrelevant magic stone on its way to being packed.

[Weatherlawyer]

This one on display on a pavement by the village bus-stop is composed of panels of unbelievably coarse crystals. The dark patches in it are shadows not black stones:

I should go back there and get some photos of the windows and do something a bit more about a close-up with coins or tape-measures. I have no idea what though. (I have to find the battery charger for my camera first.)

Sorry I can't help you but won't you local health food shop know of anywhere locally?

[Weatherlawyer]

List of mills by region locations (rather stupidly) not mentioned:

[Bob Minchin]

My understanding is that moving stones have to be fed constantly with grain and that a bell was fitted in the feed hopper of wind/water mills which was silenced by the presence of grain and when it rang, the stones had to be stopped and fed with more grain before allowing further milling to proceed.

[Davidm]

Our local mill (Redbourn Mill) still grinds and sells flour, and has a bakery where they use their flour for the bread. The Mrs often buys their flour for home breadmaking.

[harry]

[harry]

[The Natural Philosopher]

well powdered stone was part of the deal,. but they use(d) sieves to get rid of the worst of it.

well they allegedly give you a constant size ground rather than everything from a part bean to fine dust.

[damduck-egg]

Our nearest working watermill about two miles away has just stopped for the season, at least for public viewing as they grind while they also serving teas and cakes, All the grain is sourced within 20 miles and flour can be purchased. So can bread but that is done for them by a bakery using the flour. At end of the season we always wonder if they will reopen the following spring, the proprietor is pushing 80 and his wife isn't much younger. I know he has had heart problems as were both on a rehab exercise class for such things. Much of the building is also converted to bed and breakfast accomadation so they keep busy.

G.Harman

[polygonum]

The upper stone doesn't rest on the lower stone, there is a surprisingly capable mechanism for raising and lower the stone to ensure the right gap.

The grooves help to spread the grain out from the centre where it is fed in across the stones. So the grinding takes places all over.

[Adam Aglionby]

Grounds of Culzean Castle in Ayshire, ancestral home of Kennedy`s, is littered with mill stones.

Kennedy`s way of enforcing rule back in the day was to confiscate everyone elses mill stone so the only source of flour was them.

[Vir Campestris]

Properly set up the stones don't touch. The actually cut the grains, as if they were scissors, rather than squash them. Good stone ground flour should not have significant amount of stone in it.

The fun is that this is a hand cut stone mounted on a flexible wooden frame in a variable humidity environment. With lots of inflammable dust in the air if there should happen to be a spark... you really don't want a fuel air explosion :(

Andy