At home we ground it on a stone grinder.

But the actual flour mill used two steel rollers. Going on memory now which is probably flawed but as I recall one of the rollers had groves machined into it and the other was smooth and they operated at slightly different speeds. This got the endosperm out of the seed without breaking up the bran and germ like grinding does. We "learned" how to adjust the mill rolls to get the most endosperm without breaking up the bran and germ excessively.

Then in the sifting part is where the different streams of flour come into play. Quite a feeling walking around on the floor of the mill that had all the rotating screening devices (don't remember what they called). A lot of movement. I recall the stream of flour that came the closest to the bran and would have some specs of bran in it was called red dog. The idea was to mill the endosperm out as close to the bran as possible without increasing the amount of red dog. The streams of flour going through the sifting process could really be messed up by poor adjustment of the rolls because the screening was sized for each flow through the mill. Overloading one part of the screening process would plug up one of those streams and cause really big problems shutting the process down in the whole mill. Everything was moved by air.

Just remembered they they washed the wheat thoroughly then dried it, then brought the moisture back up to a certain level before milling. Everything from cleaning through milling tried to get the wheat through to flour very consistent. Consistency was the name of the game. I think before this process they ran it through a device that impacted the wheat to break up any kernels that were weevil damaged so they would be screened out before milling. There is actually a specification of how many "frags", bug part fragments, are allowable in the finished flour (a very minute amount). Another thing we were told is that they could make flour out of the poorest quality wheat. They just could not do it economically as the yield would be extremely low for the amount of raw product they had to run through the mill. So high quality wheat was of the utmost importance to get economical flour production through the mill.

Been too long ago to remember too much. I know we were there in the fairly early days of Afghanistan because the baking department was baking "sticky buns" to send a big batch of fresh rolls to the troops over there. We as students were not involved but watched a baker mix the dough and roll out what seems like a fifteen or twenty foot long roll of cinnamon, sugar and raisin covered dough, cut it to pieces, placed on baking trays and got it ready to proof in the proofing (raising) ovens. "Frozen dough" was a big deal as that is the way all the local grocery stores make "fresh baked bread". The store would only have proofing ovens and baking ovens and used the frozen dough to make the fresh baked bread locally.

Was quite an enjoyable two days. We basically went through the entire two year courses for both baking and milling (highlights only obviously) of each school course in two days. One day for each.

They had trouble keeping students for the full term to college graduation. Millers were in such demand that after a couple of years some would be offered job even before they graduated that was lucrative enough to take them out of school. Said the accounting department would have lines of applicants, maybe ten students for every job opening, but the milling department was the opposite with many job openings for the very limited number of students going to milling school. They always had 100% placement at that time (some years ago, may be different now). The two days course we got in on was to designed to help county agents know about the program and encourage high school students of the opportunity to become a miller or baker. But it was also offered to the public through Extension. I think we were the only two that were there who were not county agents. Wife at the time was grinding her own whole wheat flour and wanted to know more about it so we took the course. Seems like it cost a hundred bucks or something like that at the time.

John