[Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks Digest,Grain Mill Question

[UrthMomma at aol.com]

James, 

If she is ever making more than one batch of bread, get a real grain mill and 
motorize the sucker.  I make bread and pizza dough couple times a week and 
usually from home ground flour, grinding Prairie Gold or Montana 86 white wheat. 
 Get a Country Living Mill and motorize it or get one of electric mills like 
a Whisper Mill  to grind the flour.  

Yes there are cheap ( $50 ) non electric clamp on the table mills and they 
are fine for soaked corn for masa, but yield a nasty product for wheat or flint 
corns. The cheap hand mills are ok for cracking bulger from cooked then dried 
wheat, but that's about all the cheap hand  mills are good for when grinding 
wheat. 

Hand querns, hard to find, produce a lot of stone dust that wears down the 
teeth when the flour produced there in is eaten regularly and a frightening 
amount of hard physical work, usually delegated to the lowest status female of the 
group.- read drudge or slave.  Now you know why only about a third of the 
grain consumed by the medieval peasant was in the form of bread, according to 
some sources (Gies, Francis and Joseph. 1990 Life in a Medieval Village. Harper & 
Row, I think) I have read. Boiled grain, as porridge or pottage, was a whole 
lot less work and expense if you have the fire going anyways. 

the other Olwen
Barony of Sternfeld, Midrealm

In a message dated 4/6/2004 10:25:05 PM US Eastern Standard Time, 
sca-cooks-request at ansteorra.org writes:

> Have a bit of an odd question but here goes.  I have a friend who's 
> planning to bake all of her own bread the odd thing is she also want's 
> to grind her own grain.  The part that isn't, in my opinion, reasonable 
> she whants to do it with a hand quern.
> 
> She's asked me to help but I don't even know if anyone even makes them 
> anymore.  So anyone have any info that I could use?
>