Grinding Hard Corn for Flour

Hello, hivers!

A couple days ago, I decided that I wanted to make some corn flour using some of my home grown heirloom hard corn. The variety that I usually grow is called "Painted Mountain". This variety was developed in Montana, U.S.A. by cross-pollinating various varieties of Native American corn over a period of years to come up with a stable variety. Tests have shown that this corn, sometimes known as a flour corn, has higher nutritional value than the varieties grown commercially. Also, it's drought tolerant to some extent, and will grow at higher elevations up to 6 thousand feet, which a lot of commercial varieties don't do very well.

We have an electric grain grinder, a vintage Magic Mill brand grinder that we got second-hand at least 10 years ago and haven't used all that much. We keep it in the back of the greenhouse next to my canning area. I had to move some stuff out of the way to get to the grinder, as usual, but that's pretty typical for the greenhouse.

I got the space cleaned out and rearranged so I could use the machine, then I cleaned the machine to prepare for grinding. I started taking pictures of the process so I could use them for this post. The first picture is the machine ready to be used, and the jar of corn I wanted to grind some of.

Here's a look at the grinding wheels in the grinder. One is stationary and the other is attached to the motor and spins. The hole in the stationary wheel is where the grain feeds into for grinding. The gap between the wheels is adjustable and determines how fine the grind ends up being.

A stainless steel cover plate fits over the grinding wheels with a hole in it that directs the grain into the feed hole. Without the plate in place, stuff goes everywhere.

You pour the grain, in this case whole corn, onto the plate and help it into the hole a bit at a time while the motor is running until all the grain has been fed into the hole and the grinding is done.

The ground material ends up in the drawer in the bottom of the machine. In this case, it's fairly fine ground flour. All the dark spots are because of the color of the outer shells of the kernels. The insides of these corn kernels are an off white, so most of the flour is more or less white with a bit of added color.

Because not all of the ground up corn is fine powder, I sift the flour before putting it in a container. Maybe 5% of the flour is too course to go through the sifter. That could be used for grits or other things that are made with a coarse ground corn.

I had the corn in a 1/2 gallon canning jar and I ground up a bit less than half the jar. I ended up with a quart jar of flour and a bit of grits size ground corn.

It took longer for me to sift the flour than it did to grind it because of the speed and power of the grinder. This experiment turned out well, now I just have to experiment with using it to make something. Because corn flour doesn't stick together like wheat flour, I plan on mixing half and half with wheat flour, add a bit of baking powder, and see what happens. Perhaps some bannock or pan bread. That's a place to start.

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