SC - flour milling

[Decker, Terry D.]

> Caveat:
> > You want stone ground.  Roller milling separates the wheat germ.
> 
> Is this because of the grinding technique or the the material of the
> grinding
> wheels?
> 
> For instance as I understand it, medieval large-scale grinding involved
> rotating two discs of stone about a vertical axis. But his could be
> done with two discs of metal.
> 
> Roller milling involves pushing the wheat between two rollers rotating in
> the same horizontal axis but offset. I imagine that this too, could be
> done with stone rollers.
> 
> Or is roller milling done by rotating a roller around the top of a stone
> disc with one end of the roller connected to the center of the disc?
> 
> Is "stone ground" just a more homey way of saying a vertical axis mill
> rather than actually referring to the material of the grinding surface?
> 
> How does a roller mill seperate out the wheat germ?
> 
> -- 
> Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
> 
Roller milling presses the grain between rollers, breaking it apart and
crushing it.  In the first milling, the germ, which is distinctly separate
from the rest of the grain, is pressed off and sieved out as a product.  The
crushed grain is then fed through a series of rollers of decreasing
tolerances and the end product sieved for fineness.

Because of their composition, stone rollers can't be milled to the
tolerances of metal rollers and they are not capable of taking the milling
speeds and pressures.

Stone milling crushes the grain between two counter-rotating stones which
may be set parallel or at a 90 degree angle.  You could do stone type
milling with metal discs, but in period, the cost would have been excessive
and they probably could not match the hardness or tolerances of a set of
dressed stones.  Today the marketing cachet is for stone milled flour, which
if advertised as stone milled, needs to be milled by stones.

BTW, the horizontal stones are said to grind finer and more slowly,
generating less heat and therefore damage the flour less.

An interesting basic text about growing, milling and baking your own grain
is:

Leonard, Thom, The Bread Book; East West Health Books, Brookline,
Massachusetts, 1990.  ISBN 0-936184-09-4.

Bear  
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