processing wheat into flour

hey everybody today I'm going to show you how to make flour from wheat from the actual plant now I know you've seen pictures of this but you've probably never seen a whole field of it this is winter wheat right down the road from my house let me show you a [Music] picture to get wheat flour first you have to separate the wheat B car from all of this hole and that's called threshing then you need to wiow all of the chaff away from the wheat berry and I'm going to show you how to do that now all of this is industrial now they've got equipment that will do all of this right in the field I'm just going to show you how to do it old school maybe with a little bit of a modern Homestead or twist we're not talking about making 50 lb sacks of flour I'm just showing this out of concept alone so obviously the first thing that you would need is the wheat and this is dried and let me show you a closeup each one of these little segments contains a wheat berry and the wheat berry has a little Hull around it you want to get around all that chaff okay that's called the chaff you don't want to eat that so this is what you want that little tiny piece of wheat and then this can be ground into flour you can bake your bread out of it now you'll notice three of these just popped out it pops out pretty pretty easily full all right keep in mind this is just for proof of concept this is not an efficient way to do it this is not the way anybody does it I'm just showing you how to do the process so basically first you need to separate the heads of the wheat away from the stems normally you do this with a sickle in the field I'm just going to cut the stems I'm just going to stick this in the pillowcase okay next I'm just going to basically thresh it that means whack it bang it try to break all those little seeds off sometimes they would use a flail for this that's a special tool that kind of flails it I'm just basically beating it against concrete the other thing I've seen people do is beat it with a stick there you go bad wheat bad wheat you can crumple it with your hands you can shimmy it and Shake It that's called threshing okay now that I've threshed it I'm just going to dump it out onto the screen here's the threshed wheat and obviously we're going to throw all this out but look it we've got all this grain hidden in with all the chaff but how are you going to separate that we're going to do it by winnowing what is winnowing well in its simplest form you would drop the wheat in chaff and the wind if it's a windy day would blow the chaff away and the wheat berries being heavier would fall down onto the ground directly below but since it's not very windy today our chaff is not really separating that well so I've got another idea all right let me show you my idea I've got a fan I've got a bucket to catch the wheat berries and all the chaffs going to fly that way when I turn this fan on you ready that was phase one of separating the wheat from the Chad and it did a pretty good job now I'm going to run it through a second maybe a third time and just try to get rid of all this light chaff here goes round two and this is what it looks like after the second exposure to wind now I'll do this maybe one more time but you get the idea here's the cleaned wheat berries and and now I'm going to put them through an oldfashioned grinder and these are two millstones and the flour will come out here as I grind it and here we have it the final product directly from the field this is the wheat on the stock and here we have the milled flour ready to make bread or pie crust or dumplings and it's whole wheat and it's delicious

Channel: gregpryorhomestead

Views: 505,777

Keywords: winnow, thresh, winnowing, threshing, flour, wheat, wheat berries, greg pryor, homestead, winter wheat

Id: CwY--P9t8x8

Length: 5min 9sec (309 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2017