Testing our GARAGE SALE Grain Mills

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead today Kevin and I want to talk with you about why we find it so important to buy in bulk there are reasons that I like to buy a bulk there are reasons that Kevin like for us to buy in bulk and we just wanted an opportunity to talk with you about that today and also show you some of the equipment we have on the homestead that helps us out with the bulk items that we purchase one of the main reasons why I like to buy in bulk is because of cost savings there are a lot of things that I can buy 25 pounds of that when I compare them pound for pound what I can buy in the store there's a huge cost savings plus it's really one of the main ways that we can keep the cost of organic food down and affordable examples of things that we buy 25 pounds of at a time that I really enjoy our wheat berries dry corn rice beans split peas lentils oats barley lots of things on the homestead that we buy generally 25 pounds at a time because 25 pounds of those will normally fit in a five-gallon bucket food grade- whole wheat flour at the store to what you can mill or grind up at your home if you get the wheat berries finally berries in bulk is way cheaper so let me give you a price comparison these wheat berries they are soft white wheat berries I can get these in bulk for about 68 cents a pound but whole wheat organic ground flour is about a dollar fifty dollar seventy-five a pound so I save a ton of money by buying them in bulk now I love also to buy whole dry corn and bulk it's really hard for me to find organic dry corn and I like it because it makes the most amazing cornbread and we really like so we buy the dry corn in bulk we grind it up and I use it for my corn bread it's fantastic now when you buy cornmeal from the grocery store if you can find organic cornmeal it's something that we can't even find you're in our area but when you buy cornmeal from the store they have extracted the corn oil from it grind eat yourself you still have those oils in it which makes the flavor fantastic it's also very cost effective to buy in bulk also there's a benefit in shelf-life when you buy flowers and things that are already already ground up their shelf life is a lot less than if you buy it in a whole grain a lot of these whole grains if they're stored appropriately will be fine for up to 25 years and that's pretty crazy and that leads me to the reason that I really like buying things in bulk it's because I like having the security of having the food in the house whether you're planning for something big like a big government meltdown or you're just planning for a snowstorm that might keep you at home for a week knowing that you have things in the house that are there and able to be made into food is a very reassuring thing to have it's something that you know can just help you sleep a little bit better at night knowing that even if you can't make it to town you can't make it to the store your own shelves are stocked and even if the store shelves are empty your own shelves are stocked it just makes it you know a lot better for your family to know you have that security right at home now I've talked about this a lot in other videos especially kitchen videos that we really like to buy bulk products organic products from a company called as your standard a lot of people are having a hard time finding bulk grains bulk beans and rice especially organic absolutely so if you're interested look in the description below we'll have a link to as your standard it's a great buying company great organic products for a good price but the other thing that we wanted to talk with today is what we do with these grains at home as far as grinding them up we've had questions in past videos about how do we grind our grain what do we like we actually have three of them three different types in the homestead so we wanted to talk with you about them show you how they work and then ultimately what our recommendation is so like sarah said we have three different types of grain mills here on the homestead i think the first two that i'm going to show you i bought at garage sales a long long time ago we don't use them very often but i still keep them around and i like them for different reasons so we're going to go over those and show you kind of the you know benefits to having those I suggest that a lot of this type of equipment you watch for garage sales auctions estate sales things where you can get really good buys on things and then just store it you may use it once every ten years but if you have a barn or a pantry or somewhere where you can store things just keep them on him because you never know when you're gonna need them now the last one that we're going to show you is the one that we use all the time and it's a by far the best one that we own but we're gonna show you these first two first and I'm going to show you the what the benefits and disadvantages are to both of these all right so the first grain mill that we have is this one right here this is just a very basic cast iron grain mill there's nothing fancy about it at all but it's something that we bought a long time ago and I keep it around really for one specific reason it really doesn't do a very good job for grinding flour it doesn't get things very fine at all but it doesn't do pretty good at cracking corn so the main reason I keep it around is in case the time comes when we need to be grinded in our own animal feed we'll have this here we can put pretty much any kind of grains we want in here and grind them in a pretty coarse mix for the animals so let's try this thing out like I said it doesn't do real great at grinding things fine but I'm gonna try to grind it as fine as I can in this so that you can see how it works so we'll start with some corn because this really does best with corn now the way that this one works is there's metal plates in here that just kind of rub up against each other and the grain comes through and comes out the other end the way that you adjust it is with this right here and it basically moves the two plates closer together or further apart depending on how tight you make this now when I bought it it didn't have this piece of metal on the top here I added that you can see it's great craftsmanship there but basically what that does is it stops the grain from flying all over the place and that actually makes it go down I would have thought they'd have something like that on there but it didn't so all right so I'm going to tighten this up pretty good here pretty tight I think that's about as tight as it can probably go and still move so we're going to put a little bit of corn in here and we'll see how fine it comes out here we go all right that's pretty much all of it and you can see here what came out that it's it's pretty coarse I mean that is definitely not flour but this would be good like I said the main reason I had just given this back to a thrift store or sold it at a garage sale is because I figure it would be good for grinding up things for animal feed so I do keep it around for that but for anything else it's pretty much not not a good investment for your homestead so that's about all this one is really good for I'm not even gonna run any wheat through it because I can tell you guys some experience it doesn't do any better with wheat than it does with corn it comes out really still pretty coarse so like I said this one for human consumption I don't think is is very good at all so let's get this one out of here I'll show you the next one that we have which I also got at a garage sale all right so the next one that we have is this one right here and this one is called a Victorio which is actually a pretty nice brand and it's nicely made it just looks a lot more you know professional than the first one that we had and you know this one just mounts to your counter the same way now there is one major disadvantage to this one and that is that this one cannot do corn this one is only for really dry grains nothing that's oily or anything like that so it's really good for like wheat barley rice the really dry grains that you can put through here so don't even try to put corn through one like this it's just for the dry grains the other disadvantage to this one is it just doesn't hold a real lot at a time so you know you're gonna be here a while it's gonna take you quite a while to grind up the amount that you need to make or something like that but let's give it a test now the way that you adjust this one is actually kind of similar to the first one that I showed you there's a little knob here at the back and what they suggest is that basically to start with you tighten that until it's snug and then go back a quarter turn and then it says to never make it more fine as you're grinding so once you put something in don't try to make it even finer as you're going you can make it more coarse but never make it finer if you need to make it finer you need to take all of the grains out clean it put it back together and then start over okay so let's give this one a try with some of our wheat now another thing that I really don't like about this one is it so low to the counter you have to use a really small bowl to put under here or you could use like a pie plate or something like that but it just seems kind of weird that it's so close to the counter alright let's go ahead and put some of the wheat berries in we're not gonna put too many because then I have to grind all all right here we go so we're going to just start you can see it's doing a better job for sure than the first one it definitely comes out nice and fine let me take this off so you guys can see down inside of there you can see it doesn't move very fast [Applause] but it is doing a much better job than the first one we had let me get this all ground up and then we'll evaluate it and see what it compares dude in comparison or actual flour all right so I'm done with that I would say it took me about I don't know five or seven minutes maybe to grind this little ball of flour and I wasn't going superfast so you don't really it doesn't take terribly long but it is still a fair amount of work so now let's look at the results compared to what we could have done in the other grinder you know the just real basic grinder this does a much better job this is definitely what I would consider flour this is ground I would say about equal to like whole wheat flour that you buy in the store now keep in mind that we have soft white wheat berries here so it's going to be first of all a whiter colored whole wheat flour and it's not gonna be as dense or coarse as like the red wheat flour that you buy typically in the store so that's why it looks more white this is good for making things like pasta and things like that where the red wheat flour is higher in gluten so it's better for making breads but the one thing that I do like about this little grinder is that you can also run other things through it like rice which I know these days a lot of people are going gluten-free which we're not what we do like to experiment with some alternative flours so let me actually grab some rice and we'll try to run some rice through here and see how it does to make rice flour okay so I've got some rice now just for fun what I'm going to do is I'm also going to imagine how much we put in versus how much flour where we get out so I'm putting in a half a cup of brown rice this is brown basmati rice and we're going to keep it on the same setting that I just did the wheat on and we'll just see how this does for right all right so I'm all done with the rice now I'm impressed I think it did just as good of a job as it did on the flour in fact maybe even a little finer than the flour the best part about having a grain mill like this is you can cancel your gym membership because as long as you switch arms once in a while you get a pretty very good workout all right so let's test and see how much of this we actually got and I remember we started with a half a half of a cup of rice let's see how much flour that actually gave us well just I'd say 3/4 of a cup so that's a pretty good increase that's good to know that at least you get more than what you put in makes your hard work a little less daunting I guess so that's awesome I might experiment with this later on and try some different recipes with it I'll let you guys know if I come up with something good so we do have one final grain mill and like I said it's the one that we use most of the time here on the homestead I should let Sarah show you that one let me get my stuff clear out of your way this is our third grain mill and the one that we use most often because it is electric you can do quite a lot at one time and it goes really fast and there's no work out at all that's why I don't have big muscles like Kevin cuz I use the electric granville all the time so there are two main grains that we grind up in here the first is wheat or wheat berries the second is corn so I'm going to grind up some of that for you today show you how this works now this particular mill is called a wonder mill there are several different kinds of electric grain mills on the market and they're all good like ER the other two that we talked with you about this one is not without some hiccups also we've had some problems with grain getting stuck down kind of in the not the motor but kind of in the grinding parts and it hasn't worked 100% all the time so while we prefer to use this electric one we've had some kick ups with this as well so the nice thing about this grain mill is it has three settings it has a coarse setting a bread setting and the pastry setting so depending on what you're gonna be grinding and what you're going to be using the flour for you can adjust that and it does work really well so the first thing I'm going to grind for you today is just a little bit of wheat flour now on this grain mill you dump the seeds into this hopper here it goes through the you know motor and it gets shut out through here into this holding bin and then when you're done you pop this off open up the lid and what you've just ground up is inside here so let's do that one thing I've done a couple times which you need to be careful about is I've forgotten to connect these two and turn it on and there was a big poof of flour all over the place so try not to do that makes a huge mess okay so let's try some wheat in here I'm just going to try half of a cup so you can see what it looks like what it sounds like how it works this is very loud I'm gonna grind the wheat on the bread setting that seems to be a good all-purpose setting for me so I'm going to turn it on it kind of sounds like a spaceship [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so that didn't take long at all it took about 30 seconds one thing with these grain mills is that you absolutely don't want to turn it off when it's actively grinding the grain so it can get stuck in there and really cause complications so now that we're all done we can detach this take a look inside and see outworked now 1/2 of a cup of grain turned into a bunch inside of there that is way more than the three-quarters of a cup that kevin got from hand grinding so that's pretty awesome now that probably is because this does a better job grinds at find out finer and because it's shooting it out of there I think it adds a lot of air fluffs it up so let me measure it but the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pass a spatula through it just to get some of that air out of there if you are gonna use this in a recipe right away you'll want to do what I'm doing you can just see I'm just just stirring it around to get some of the air out of that so that when we measure it it's actually a true measurement so let's see how much we actually got out of 1/2 of a cup of the wheat berries you know Kevin ground the rice and maybe it has something to do with the differences in the type of grain as well I'm not sure okay good enough what it does see what it gave us just about a cup so there was a little bit of difference there now we're just gonna clean this up and get ready to grind something else up I think we're gonna start with some corn okay I'm gonna grind some corn next I grind corn on the bread setting because I like the consistency of that when I make cornbread it comes out kind of like corn flour rather than cornmeal the coarse setting if you wanted cornmeal you would use that setting it's a lot it's a lot more coarse now Kevin with you about the difference between the two green bells that he showed you and the second one could only do really smaller grains the nice thing about this wonderment mill and other electric grain mills like it is it can do a larger variety of grains now they can't be oily grains it can't be nuts or seeds like sunflower seeds but you can do things as big as corn garbanzo beans you can do lentils split peas even pinto beans so it's really pretty versatile and I really like that about these bigger electric grain mills okay so let's go ahead and grind up some corn again it's gonna be loud and even grinding up the corn itself is louder [Music] [Applause] okay let's see what that looks like this is actually my most favorite reason to use this green millas for this cornflower I didn't do a whole lot you can see what it looks like in there nice and thin perfect for some cornbread I actually love this you know one thing I wanted to talk to you about is you know these days there are so many alternative flowers lots of people are going gluten-free for one reason or another but the alternative flowers are so expensive you can easily get those grains whole grains from places like as your standard bring them home and grind them like this for just a fraction of the price so if you are going that direction you want to do more gluten-free baking but know how expensive those flowers are you may want to consider buying a green mill like this that will do those alternative greens so there you go those are the three types of grain mills that we own here on our homestead we get a lot of questions about that now again we didn't do this video to endorse any certain brand or type of grain mill we just wanted to show you some of the options that are out there and get your minds thinking about some of the cost savings that you can have by owning a grain mill and then ordering a lot of those things in bulk also to get you thinking about the potentials for alternate types of flours that are out there and that you can do at home and really the food security and the shelf life that these have as opposed to ground flowers yeah one of the things that the kids have really enjoyed in the past is grinding our only or cream of wheat you know when you're grinding wheat is not just for flour a homemade cream of wheat with freshly ground wheat is so good on a cold morning so you know start thinking about things that you can buy in a store on your homestead and have that security so you guys we hope that you enjoyed spending some time with us today learning about some of the bulk foods that we buy and the grain mills that we have here on the homestead if you're enjoying our Channel please hit the subscribe button below and make sure that you're sharing our videos with everyone you know on your social media and until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 112,860

Rating: 4.9571452 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, buying food in bulk, grinding grains, grain mill, wonder mill, wonder mill grain mill, azure standard, buying bulk grains, bulk grains

Id: N4nDAcelQoQ

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020