Grinding

Flaking oats

A few years ago we bought a manual grain grinder, an oatmeal flaker attachment, and conversion to hook it up to a Kitchen Aide machine.  Both manual and Kitchen Aided work fine but it's work to grind enough wheat for bread or baking!  After Craig attended a family reunion this past summer, he recommitted to a more organic lifestyle after talking with one of his cousins, a farmer, Mark Askegaard of Askegaard Farms.

See previous post here http://carfreeinannarbor.blogspot.com/2010/09/golden-omega-flax.html
After giving the situation some serious consideration, we purchased a Vitamix with the grain-grinding container.  What used to take 45 minutes now takes 1.5 minutes!  I now routinely grind wheat and nuts/seeds for recipes, fresh.  Not counting the cost of the Vitamix, it's cheaper to purchase whole almonds and make almond meal...but realistically, the cost of the machine can't be ignored.

Today I ran out of flaked oats so Craig set-up the manual flaker and made quick work of flaking 10 cups of oats.  Oats are way easier to flake than grinding hard red winter wheat for bread.  Wheat is a harder kernel and needs to go through the grinder twice - once on coarse grain and a second pass through a fine die. Which is why I now exclusively grind wheat in the Vitamix but continue to have oats flaked by hand.  The Vitamix could make oat flour but I'm preparing oatmeal bars today which I think is better with flakes.

Astrid