I'm looking at flour mills again and reconsidering my options.
What effect does the burr type have on the flour? I'm looking at a Natural Stone burr mill out of Austria versus a Grainmaker and various synthetic mills with the KoMo MIO at an attractive price-point.
I think the steel burrs have an advantage with hard wheats though, stone mills can be tweaked to work with those ancient grains. Steel burrs also seem to have an advantage with oily seeds and legumes like peanuts and sesame seeds. How about grinding corn for cornmeal? I'm thinking steel burrs are probably the better option for me but, I keep coming back to natural stone burrs. Is heat a bigger problem with any of them or, is it really just a capacity and throughput issue?
What burr type do you favor and why? Any particular mill that works better for you than previous ones? I'm looking to stay under ~$600 though cheaper is better but, I'm also willing to save up longer for something above this price range. Ideally, it won't weigh so much it is impractical to store, set up and, put away for smaller amounts of flour for smaller batches of bread, rolls or, muffins.
Things I'm initially looking for
- soft winter wheat flour I can't seem to get where I live (like White Lilly) or at least for a reasonable price
- fresh-milled corn for various uses with better cornbread and muffins being desired
- other things TBD like chickpea flour and similar are pretty far off in the horizon as is peanut butter
Sid, first, I have never ground corn, or any oily grain, so can't help you there, On the other hand, I own, or have owned , many of the different mills ( in my defense I bought them used ).
There are a few that offer both stone and steel burrs for the same machine. Retsel ( which I have ) does offer both, and there are few others, though I can't recall the names right now. Retsel gets a bad rap for customer service, and can be extremely expensive when new.
I have had a few steel burr machines, in general, they do not grind as fine a flour as a stone mill, since often we set the stones to kiss each other, and normally you don't want that with steel burrs.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0032591093027697 If you are going to want to grind an oily grain, that rules out most stone mills.
As to stone mills, I have the Komo, the Lee Household, the All Grain, and the Retsel. Of those, the Lee has the best engineering ( other that the universal motor, which can be a deal breaker on a used model ) but the new model is over your price range. The Komo does a nice job, though frankly, I don't see much difference with most of the horizontal stone mills - they all have one fixed stone, one rotating stone, and a method to adjust the separation between the two. Some stones have deep grooves, others have more shallow grooves, but in practice, to me, if you want finer grain, you need a mill that has a fairly precise method to adjust the gap between the stones. Also, it helps if the mill has a method to keep the stones exactly parallel to each other.
I have never bought into the argument that natural stones are better than artificial stones, and the stones that i have look fairly different , though produce similar results.
While heat could be a issue, it is something you could work around if you were concerned, though most of what I have read is that the flour that comes out of most mills is not so hot that it damaged the flour ( though I don't think there is any way to measure the temp of the flour while in the milling chamber ).
Unless you get an impact mill, like the classic Nutrimill, most mills will be either bulky, heavy, or both. The better ones have heavy duty motors, which makes them weigh a fair amount, though not so heavy that you can't lift it.
Of the current stock, my two favorites are the Lee and the Retsel. The Lee has an extremely well designed mechanism to grind the flour - it does not use two stones, there is just one stone, and in effect, a screen at the back and the narrower you set the screen , the finer the output, However, the feed mechanism is based on a fairly narrow range of sizes of berries, so it would probably be the least flexible for other uses. The Retsel has some good features in that it uses gear reduction to reduce the speed of the stones ( all the others that have stones spin them many times faster ) but the one I have is extremely heavy, you would not want to take it out of a cabinet, put in on a counter, and return it each time you use it.
Thanks Barry! I appreciate your detailed reply.