A Visit to the Neighborhood Miller

On the Art, and Beauty, of Baking with Fresh-Ground Ancient Grains (Pt. 1)

At the café this week, my friend Nick came up to my table with a big, soupy¹ smile on his face. He told me the flour mill he’d ordered had been delivered, and he invited me to come over and give it a try.

This was very good news indeed. The last time I’d ground my own grain, I’d used a grindstone and a quern (or actually, a Mexican metate, intended for grinding corn), a process that took me at least five hours of hard labour, and left my back and shoulders aching and my palms blistered. (I describe the way I went about making Neolithic flatbread in this post.) I still had five bags of whole grain left over from that experiment, and I’d been looking for a way to reduce the hard kernels to flour without incurring too much pain. I’m a proponent of de-industrializing the kitchen, but there are limits to the lengths a twenty-first-century human can be reasonably expected to go.

Why go to the trouble of grinding your own grain? One factor is cost: buying whole grain in bulk is cheaper than purchasing already-ground flour, and it can be stored almost indefinitely. The other factors are flavour and nutrition (the two, I’ve noticed, are often connected).