In honor of our forefathers of engineering

Teemok

Happy fathers day all.

I know this is not about heating but I also know that radiator types like old engineering and designs. Bread does have caloric value, so it is about heating but humans, not spaces or water.

I make an old world Flemish bread called Desem. That's another story. It involves freshly milled flour. I've researched lots of contraptions, new and old that claim to mill well. Many of them are quite expensive. Anyway, I discovered this gem of American made ingenuity. It's from a time when things were made to last life times.

Back story: The inventor, Dr. Royal Lee thought commercially milled flour sucked and he invented a machine, for home use, that milled wheat berries in to a fine flour at low temperatures. This protected the wheat's complete nutritional value. You might think this is an easy problem to solve but it's really not that easy. Pat. filed 1927

I got a this Lee mill "for parts only" on an ebay sale at a fraction of the going rate $300-500. I took it apart, cleaned it and added a makeshift flour collection bag and hopper. It works beautifully. The design is unlike any I've seen. It's a hybrid of an impact mill and a grinding stone mill. The stone is a fixed tube ring and there's a spinning disk inside that ring that flings wheat at it.

I'll describe the berries path:

At the bottom of the hopper there's a 90 degree turn with an opening facing the motors shaft end. The 1-1/2' hole is blocked by a spinning disk. The disk is mounted on the end of the motor shaft. A centripetal mechanism moves the disk backwards creating a gap at the edge of the disk and the hole that wheat berries fall through. As the berries load up in the grinding chamber the motor's the rpm drops and the above gap closes. Thus works the feed governor part.

Once past the door the wheat berries encounter another spinning disk that has two shoots opposite each other radially. The wheat is flung down the shoots to the outer edge of the spinning disk where it hits the 2" wide flat inside face of the stationary carborundum/stone ring. The wheat is whirled around by the disk, air and bigger wheat particles hitting the stone repeatedly till it is small enough to leave that chamber though a rear outer edge grind quality gap. A back wall disk is adjusted by a hand lever at the rear. A smaller gap make finer flour. The flour is blown through exit gap, into a chamber and down into the collection bag.

A modern marvel to this day.

EBEBRATT-Ed

Looks like fun but you're going to get flour all over the living room and have to clean up that mess. LOL😊😊

Where does the "low temperature part" come in?

And I don't know anything about wheat. What are the wheat berries?

Jamie Hall

That's ingenious. One of the major tricks to creating quality flour is keeping the temperature always low. One advantage to the old, slow turning mill stones is that they usually did that.

Teemok

@Jamie hall That's exactly right. I think the through air flow keeps it cool. I've done 10lbs continuous and it doesn't heat up at all. Output stays steady 115F. Ambient 82F. The motors was made in house and will outlast me for sure. I should have shot pictures when it was all dissembled. Quality throughout.

@EBEBRATT-Ed I wouldn't be married 26 years if the wife wasn't tolerant of me and my mess making or if I didn't clean them up.

JUGHNE

We have a Retsel Mil Master (built in Idaho). We got it about 1980. It has a 1/2 HP gear reduction motor.

I believe it runs at 90 RPM on the stones. Will grind wheat as fine as you would ever want it. And only up to about 106 degrees. Came with a stand by hand crank…never used it.

When there were 6 of us here we would get a 50 Lb bag of organic wheat….maybe 15 dollars ?? A 65 Lb bushel sold for about 6.50. It took about a year to get thru the bag. The mill was spendy at the time but I am sure of the ROI and it still works.

Wife had a system of baking 6 loaves at a time in standard oven. We had a recipe using honey, brown sugar and molasses. Used steel quart cans standing up right in the oven. Round slices the size of hamburgers.

Out of curiosity I checked on line about the Retsel brand, the founder had passed away and quality had went down and maybe now out of business.

Teemok

@JUGHNE They are still in business. They are also a great design. Not as unique as the Lee. Word is Retsel customer service is limited and it takes a long time (many months) to get one after you pay near $1000. I paid $50 and the ebay listing was in my town. What are the odds? If you sold yours today you'd make a profit and it would be gone fast. I've heard of bakeries running them long days for years.

Teemok

Here's a link to Dr Royal Lee's history. Like so many great minds of his time, he started of moderate means on a farm. My favorite kind of thinker, multi disciplined, with a whole systems approach. The word vitamin wasn't in the dictionary when he was in high school. Much of what he was concerned about is still at the center of the many health problems in our culture.

https://my.standardprocess.com/Products/Literature/The-Story-of-Dr-Royal-Lee

Larry Weingarten

Hi @Teemok , Thankyou! This is good and interesting information. 👍️

Yours, Larry

Alan (California Radiant) Forbes

@Teemok: Would this have any implication for people with celiac disease? Or at least with gluten intolerance?

Some friends of mine can't eat wheat products made here - they get sick. But they can eat bread all day in Europe.

Teemok

I am obviously not a scientist or a doctor.Talking about a single dietary component and not addressing the other elephants in the room isn't smart. What I think I know is: our bodies are what they are from many thousands of years of eating a variety of seasonal unprocessed foods. Our modem life is very far removed from that. The prevalence of cheap, constantly available, low fiber, nutrient empty, sugar/starch/fat calorie dense food is the result of us hacking us. It is additive and a huge profit driver in it's consumption and in dealing with the resulting illnesses. Cooking and fermentation of whole food is a beneficial processing that makes nutrients more available to the our guts as apposed to the concentration, extraction and combining processes. Our gut's bacteria population is determined by what we consistently shove in our faces. That changeable microbiological gut herd shares space with 70-80 % of our immune systems cells. That herd we keep is intimately connect to our brain and is thought to be a large part of what determines how we feel, our drives and what we get sick with. Autoimmune problems, allergies and many other illnesses are complex reactions to complex conditions.

Wheat (the modern industrial product) has been genetically selected and now engineered for making a white powder with the primary goal of pleasure and profits. Many of the like refined products are less than 20 mins away from being toxic nerve death blood sugars. Making fat is the bodies only means of reducing toxic blood sugar levels. Concentrated sugar inputs easily and regularly overwhelm the bodies blood sugar control system. Inflammation is the bodies system wide reaction. A crappy sugar/starch/bad fat trained gut herd harms the gut rather than aids it. Nothing is isolated. Doctors are considering relabeling dementia as "brain diabetes". Dementia and type 2 are directly linked to our white powder consumption. Combined that with a lack of consistent quality dietary fiber and nutrient deficiencies and it leads to many undesired health conditions. It's no wonder many have gastrointestinal tract problems.

Gluten and celiac is what you asked about. It's very trendy to claim to have celiac disease or to be gluten intolerant. Studies have proven many of those claims are questionable but some small % of people really are intolerant and do have celiac. There's little doubt in my mind that cutting back on simple carbs that have previously been a part of illness will make one feel better. I say all this to point out that we are all more or less intolerant, to some degree, given other dietary and health conditions. Gluten, as you likely know, can't be digested by humans. Best case is it passes through us without bothering us much. But the biological herd in sourdough starter can break it down. Sourdough and long cold fermentation breads don't line up well with our current main preoccupation, efficient profit making, but they are great for health.

What exactly is different in Europe? Obviously, we are. Stress reduction and enjoying life might be part of it. The wheat may well be a bit different. Pesticides and chemicals, soil quality, and how bread is made would be my first guesses. There's also something incredibly powerful at play. The idea in the American mind that something in Europe is different. That's a widely held notion. Placebo! It works every time and has an undeniable, substantial and consistent effect. A doctor friend of mine jokes that he wants to open a placebo facilitators training school.

Straight answer: I don't know. Anecdotally, I've had people swear that Desem and similar types of breads don't give them symptoms. I wouldn't recommend a lot of it to anyone who is currently ill. It takes more than just bread for the gut herd to dramatically change and the physical gut structure to heal, if it ever will. Genuine long fermented whole grain bread is hard to come by. So many peoples testing efforts are flawed from the start as they don't have the real thing. Few are able collect or interpret good data. There's a significant % of our population who don't even really know what the scientific process is, let alone place any trust in it.

Larry Weingarten

@Teemok , You hit so many nails on the head with this post! A few of us (not many!) on The Wall are getting older, and this is the sort of research we need to act on to be able to keep going. I've been studying health for years now, and what I've found lines up nicely with what you've written. The Standard American Diet is SAD and we need to do better. Finding good info still takes work, but thinking about and gaining "healthspan" rather than simply lifespan makes it worthwhile. Anything by Joel Fuhrman is worth paying attention to. He's good at bringing interesting perspectives to the conversation.

Yours, Larry

Teemok

@Larry Weingarten I credit and thank my Mother for giving me the basics of healthy eating. Thanks Mom! Being a Gen X hippy kid, I rebelled for a time but the wisdom was never completely abandoned. I got moved a lot with minimal unstable parental oversight. I was taught well to question and reject. Both a blessing and a curse. I really wanted/ had to fit in somehow. After I fully rejected alcohol and made it through the midlife BS, I sift through what I overlooked or ignorantly rejected while young. Now, I find it's much easier to handle all the stupidity of the past, my own, parent's and humanity's. I'm better tuned to appreciate the wisdom of before while letting the rest fall away. I recognize Joel. Thanks for the tip.

EBEBRATT-Ed

@Teemok

Sadly (and I mean no disrespect) you know more than any Dr I have ever seen.

Some things, actually many things, nutrition included (and many would be shocked by this) medical doctors have never been trained in.

Teemok

@EBEBRATT-Ed Doctors vary and are just people. I'd wouldn't do more than jokingly compare my skill set or knowledge base to a basic doctor's. We live in a specialization culture. Professionals get good at providing what's expected of them. Competing motivations make things complicated and many times weird. Hucksters and shills are everywhere. My father once told me the questions: What do you eat? and Who should do the dishes? are heavily debated and politically charged questions. Diet is so controversial, preference /pleasure driven, tied to profits and is at the center of culture, identity concepts and philosophies. It's a freekin minefield. I think doctors conserve their efforts to be as effective as they can be without getting side tracked or pissing folks off. Doctors are fantastically sharp tools. The culture they serve and the structures of their industry inform how the tool is shaped and how it gets used. Emergencies, mitigations and the lowest hanging fruits for the highest profit is the game. Pills and cutting are much preferred to dealing with juggernauts of root problems. Why don't they go ahead solve climate change while they're at it? (JK) Some doctors are very good at diet but I agree they are more rare than they should be. I suspect there's very logical reasons for that and it's not because doctors aren't that good.