Grinding your own flour

Michael_K

Does anybody produce their own flour from grain and can offer any advice on what equipment they would recommend?

I can only use gluten-free flour and have recently started to buy organic food where the budget allows. Organic gluten-free flour isn't widely available and tends to be expensive. So grinding my own flour would be a moneysaver and maybe even better tasting. I hope to be able to grind rice etc. and maybe pulses.

Things I've tried in the past with rice:
- Hand-operated coffee grinder: I got flour but it was a lot of work for little reward.
- Ordinary blender: Just discovered this recently that some people use a standard blender to produce flour from dry grains. I tried it in an old Kenwood blender and got some usable flour. I see some of the current blenders available have dedicated 'grain mill' containers.

So now I need my own bit of kit, and top of the short list for this is a Kenwood blender BL440 currently £20 from Amazon.

Thanks for any advice.

SallyinWales

I occasionally do it the old fashioned way with a saddle quern, but its not really practical for everyday grinding unless you really like doing the whole neolithic thing. This very topic has been discussed in some depth over on Downsizer.net - bear with me and I'll try to dig out a link to the relevant thread.

SallyinWales

Here we go
http://forum.downsizer.net/viewtopic.php?t=5791&highlight=grain

also, if you do a search there on 'grain', 'grinding' or 'milling' you should turn up some other discussions on this topic. I know some people there are hoping to be self sufficient in flour eventually

Zziggi

Michael_K wrote:

Does anybody produce their own flour from grain and can offer any advice on what equipment they would recommend?

I can only use gluten-free flour and have recently started to buy organic food where the budget allows. Organic gluten-free flour isn't widely available and tends to be expensive. So grinding my own flour would be a moneysaver and maybe even better tasting. I hope to be able to grind rice etc. and maybe pulses.

Things I've tried in the past with rice:
- Hand-operated coffee grinder: I got flour but it was a lot of work for little reward.
- Ordinary blender: Just discovered this recently that some people use a standard blender to produce flour from dry grains. I tried it in an old Kenwood blender and got some usable flour. I see some of the current blenders available have dedicated 'grain mill' containers.

So now I need my own bit of kit, and top of the short list for this is a Kenwood blender BL440 currently £20 from Amazon.

Thanks for any advice.

do you have a Kenwood chef/major?

If so the item below works wonderfully for grinding rice (haven;t tried it on anything else yet)
http://www.kenwoodworld.com/product_detail.php?cat=130&id=283