#HTE

A Student’s Gourmet Grain Mill

We can thank grain for the development of civilization, and you can buy Hostess bread around the planet, so it’s fair to say grain grinding is a pretty well explored field. But like all things “traditional” or “whole grain,” that doesn’t disqualify a tasteful redesign. 

Designer Meng Jie Chen began work on the Millithic Stone Mill as a student back in 2013. The project was intended to address the loss of nutritional value in mass scale grinding, and bring healthier carbs back into play in the personal kitchen. For commercial grinding the wheat berry is stripped of the germ in the interest of shelf stability (it contains a bit of oil and can go rancid). Unfortunately for us, that tosses out a ton of the nutritional material that makes wheat an actually healthy grain and most of the fiber goes with it. Meng also cites the high speeds and high heat of industrial grinding as factors that can detract from the nutritional value, starch quality and overall flavor of flour.

The Millithic Stone Mill places its two stone wheels horizontally, adds a top mounted grinder handle, and stows the ground flour internally in the weighted cast iron pan base. Manual operation keeps the process accessible without electricity, reduces parts failure, and cuts down on noise. 

Many regions around the world still use variations on stone pestles, and heavy counter-mounting grinders are common enough in homesteads and disaster-minded prepper households, but I’d never seen a clean contemporary take on the manual stone mill. (Honorable mention to the KoMo Magic, which is beautiful but isn’t manual.)

Given the cultural firestorm about gluten, there’s been increasing discussion about the healthy use of DIY whole grain flours, but it’s certainly not widely practiced in everyday food culture. The Millithic Mill is still just a concept project, but I wonder if we won’t see more like it in coming days.