Grinding flour.

About these beans we've been growing, I know we've got far more than we thought we'd ever have but thing about planting is that you never know for sure what is going to pop up.  Take this years beetroot for example, lots in  but almost nothing growing.  Such is life.

So we have too many beans, now nearly all dry and podded and we thought we'd try making some broad bean flour as it has lots of uses.  You can replace up to 25% of normal flour in bread making with broad bean flour, use it instead of cornflour for thickening sauces etc.  The biggest problem - for us anyway - is converting the dried bean into flour.  The food processor and liquidiser are not designed for beans, even coffee beans are not recommended and habas are much harder.  A quick look online comes up with home milling machines but at some very expensive price but what we do have is a table top meat mincer.  Worth a try.

In went a handful of beans which came out the other end into a bowl,  slightly chopped up. They then went into the liquidiser to see if we could grind them finer which we did although we then sieved them to get rid of the biggest bits left from the outside skin.  Long term it would seem that the liquidiser - as it's name suggests - is not meant for making flour and either the blades will go blunt or it's motor will burn out. 

This morning though I was up on the top terrace digging over an ex-bean bed ready for other vegetables and my neighbour was also working on her vegetable garden.  Chatting as we worked,  the subject of bean flour came up again - we talked about it a few days ago - and she offered us the use of their flour milling machine that they don't use as they have an electric one for grinding wheat flour.  It's big, quite heavy to move around though easy to use.  And it grinds anything - we've ground down some more habas for flour and crushed some coriander seeds too.  They  were quicker and easier to do than using a pestle and mortar!

And here it is!  Not the best of photos - it was taken at the end of a day of housework, digging, rushing in when the thunder, lightning and rain came at lunchtime then more digging later on.  (Anyway, the photo's meant to show the mill not me)