I’m currently enrolled in a civic engagement class about the food system, and today we took a field trip — one of many for the semester. I love getting a chance to get out of the classroom and actually walk around and do stuff, and sometimes we even get the chance to eat (SCORE).
Today we loaded up in the cars and trucked about an hour away to a small town called Linden to visit Westwind Milling Co., LLC. Shameless plug here. It’s a small store in a larger bread mill that grinds the wheat into grain into flour which they then use to bake and sell bread.
Today I learned where flour really comes from.
photo courtesy of Emily at Eat Close to Home
I guess I’ve never thought about it until now. I knew flour comes from wheat, and I knew that “wheat” bread and “whole wheat” bread are completely different things, but I’d never even thought about the entire process of turning little wheat grains into silky, powdery, get-everywhere flour. Lee Purdy, who owns the mill, showed us around and demonstrated the process of grinding the wheat repeatedly with stones until it produces the flour he wants.
His mill is extremely old (171 years, to be exact, and still kickin’) and dusty, but according to Lee, milling technology hasn’t changed all that much. Everything is automatic and runs on pulleys, but the entire mill is still original lumber and dust-covered steel machines. If you’d walked in when the machines weren’t running or when no one was there, you’d think the place was abandoned. Lee himself admitted he had all the makings of a haunted mill (cobwebs, creaky doors)… just no ghost.
Basically, the grain is pulled up on a conveyor belt system of cups from the first floor all the way up to the third, and then it falls back down to the first through a series of sifters and cones (they employ the natural use of gravity to save on energy costs for moving the wheat through the cones), and then down a silo into a very simple wheat crushing machine — two rocks that grind against each other. The rocks are encased in metal, but it’s the same concept as if you banged something with a rock until it turned powdery.
The rough powdered wheat still has all of the parts of the kernel in it — the bran (which he compared to an eggshell), starch (like an egg white) and the germ (like the yolk). But not all types of flour are the same, so the powder is then sifted repeatedly to separate each part of the ground kernel. Basic white bread has the least amount of nutrients and uses just the starch, and the healthiest kind of bread employs all part of the wheat kernel and has the most proteins and nutrients.
We then proceeded to use dough Lee had already made to bake sweet rolls, which I currently have in my room and are delicious — I used fruit in mine, but some used a mixture of herbs and cottage cheese and mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes which resulted in a kind of cheesy roll that was aaaaaamazing. All and all a most successful afternoon.
