July 29, 2012 - 9:38pm
Milling Cornmeal using a motorized Country Living Mill
I have a motorized CL Mill and I'm trying to grind cornmeal with it. I've replaced the auger to the corn and bean auger but I'm having a difficult time getting my grind right. It seems as it it starts going fine but after a few min it sounds like a piece of corn gets hung up s0mewhere and it makes a loud whining noise. I have to turn it off and open up the grind and then crank it ack down only for it to happen again in a ninute or two. Any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong here? Ihm I'm using popcorn as my grain.
Thanks!
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Popcorn isn't suitable for cornmeal. It's extremely hard compared to field, or dent, corn. Popcorn may be messing up your mill.
try three different passes, first to crack coursley in 1/8" pieces, second to course sand, third to flour. it will go faster this way too rather than trying one very tight pass.
Actually I contacted Country Living directly and the walked me through my set up. Apparantly I added the corn to the hopper prior to having my plates adjusted. That caused whole kernals to pass through the plates and it just messed up the rest of the grinding. I ended up taing the front plate off, emptying the hopper, putting the plate back on and adjusted the plate nice and snug. I filled up the hopper and turned it on, and wadaya know, I was makin cornmeal. Thanks for the infor anyway guys. on a ifferent note, Im trying to locate a plase the sells Flint corn. I live in southwest Ohio. Any idea on where I might find it?
I'm having problems, too, grinding corn. I just got a beautiful KoMo Magic and it grinds wheat to perfection. Today, I bought the "right" kind of corn---I couldn't find "dent" or "field" but the woman at the very well-reputed organic store told me that this was the same thing---it was called simply, "Organic Whole Corn." It certainly looked different than the popcorn (which is not suitable for grinding)----and had all the featurs of what is normally called "dent" corn.
But my grinder simply wouldn't work with it. The kernels didn't really go down into the hopper. A few at a time would and nice medium grind meal would come put, but the others would simply sit in the hopper or spin aimlessly around without going in, with the result that my machine was spinning and grinding with nothing much in it, so I had to keep turning it off. I even left it mostly on the Coarse setting (which the manual said to do), but to no avail. It took forever to get even 1/2 cup out of it (as opposed to the few seconds it takes to grind hard red wheat into beautiful fine flour.
Rather than risk ruining my beautiful machine, I'm resigning myself to not being able to grind corn. But I use cornmeal often in bread recipes (usually 1/3 of a cup---not much to grind) and would prefer to use freshly ground corn.
I read online to try a food processor, but that didn't work either.
I'm just starting to think that it is not really workable to grind corn in a machine unless one has a very high-powered one. Mine is an excellent model, but is not super high powered (which I like about it).
Ideas, anyone?
Blessings,
Liz
Having only used a handful of mills, this is largely speculation on my part.
Mills are designed for one particular grain/use; example, Corona style mills are primarily designed for use on corn. Think of the balance between two factors, the drive- screw, and the mill plates. The plates dictate how fast and how fine the grain gets milled. The screw how fast/well grain gets fed to the plates. In the case of a corona mill the screw pitch is quite aggressive and feeds a lot of material fast. In the case of a mill like the Country Living the screw is more gentle. What does this mean? The corona mill, when used on harder grains that need a slower mill, forces things through fast, which ultimately limits how fine of flour that can be made with wheat. In the case of a mill like the KoMo Magic, I speculate that the overall feed mechanism isn't quite right for something like corn.
It was only after I tried a Country Living mill that I realized the problem with Coronas and trying to make fine flour. One of these days I need to try to adjust the screw on a Corona and see if I can get one to perform better with wheat.
As for your milling problem, as I hope I illustrated above, it's not so much your machine isn't powerful enough, It's the feeding that's a problem. If you lived near by I'd let you try one of my Corona mills, as I'm fairly confident they'd excel in that application.