General pictures of the dehulling plates and kit from when I dehulled barley are shown here.
The seed photographs were taken with this level of magnification using a soft white incandescent light bulb for illumination. The diameter of a quarter is 24.26 mm (0.955 in). This photo demonstrates the sense of scale for any 'grain' pictures.
This is Duborskian upland rice gifted to us by a fellow backyard grain grower over on Michigan's west side.
We planted and harvested some Duborskian rice this past season, but we want to have one more season of increasing our inventory before offering seed. For those interested in growing some this season, I suggest here. From the sample of seeds shown, I used my seed screens to sort out the largest 5% of seeds to retain for potential seed stock.
This is a Model No 99 from Grainmaker of Montana. For grain grinding, it comes with a pair of steel milling plates. Some of our experiments are being doing with the dehulling kit which are plates with a rubber layer that are used in place of the grinding plates. Sometimes I use one grinding and one rubber plate (just don't let them touch).
In the barley tests, I used the steel/rubber plate combination because of the strength of barley hulls. During this adventure with rice, I'm going with rubber/rubber in my first set of tests.
The rice grains do a lot of 'rolling' as they migrate their way to freedom.
Here is my rice sample after 3 passes through the mill and a few passes of winnowing with the box fan:
With a bit of counting and calculating, I found the following:
71% dehulled in the first pass
83% dehulled after the second pass through the mill
93% dehulled after the third pass through the mill
I opened the plates 21 clicks from 'fully closed' for the first pass. It took 26 clicks to get the 2nd and 3rd pass to feed. For those with different equipment, take a look at the photo above to see the plate gap relative to the thickness of the grain.
So after this first run using the Grainmaker to dehull upland rice, here are my initial observations and future plans:
- As a homesteader, I could grow and eat rice with a dehull rate > 90% with a bit of manual 'picking'. 98% is my goal.
- Between the 1st and 2nd pass, I used a fan to clean out the hulls so I could admire the results. Maybe I should have left the hulls 'in the mix' to help with the rubbing.
- After the 1st pass, there was < 0.5% broken grains. No additional grains broke in 2nd and 3rd passes. That was a pleasant surprise.
- The 'chamber' within the mill holds about 65 grams of grain. Instead of weighing what I put in, I found it easiest to keep feeding fresh grain until I got a 100 gram sample on the output side.