The history of making flour
If you want to make bread, biscuits or cakes, you first have to make flour, by grinding grain or cereal.
Early quern stones and Rotary querns
Quern stones, stone tools for hand grinding, were first used during the Stone Age to grind cereal grains (such as barley, oats, rye and wheat) and nuts and other vegetable food products for eating. One of the earliest forms of quern stone was the ‘saddle’ quern. People put the grain on a big flat stone (‘quern’) and rubbed it backwards and forwards will a small stone (‘handstone’)
They had to spend 5 hours every day just grinding grain to make enough flour to feed their families.
The rotary quern was invented during the fifth to third centuries BC. As the name implies, the rotary quern used circular motions to grind materials. The handstone of a rotary quern is much heavier than that of a saddle quern and provided the necessary weight for the grinding of grain into finer flour.
Mills and mill stones
As the demand for flour grew and populations increased, there needed to be a more efficient method of producing flour. But bigger stones meant they were too heavy to turn by hand. Initially, some places used donkeys, horses or slaves. With time, where there was a good river, watermills were built.
These water-powered mills were common by Roman times and used much larger circular-shaped stones; mill stones. These produced a finer flour than that produced by hand-held tools.
Many mill stones in Britain are made with hard-wearing quartz from France and, although expensive, they lasted for 50 years or more. They are not cut from one piece but built up from sections of quartz, cemented together with plaster and bound with iron bands.
Winchester City Mill’s mill stones were made by a specialist manufacturer in Holland in 2007 and contain quartz and basalt to give the same performance as French stones.
Mill stones are not flat underneath. Grains of cereal are very tough and if the stones were flat the grains would just roll between them. So each mill stone has a series of special grooves (‘furrows’) cut in to its surface. When paired with another mill stone, the grooves make a kind of scissoring motion creating the cutting or grinding function of the stones. The grooves are also at an angle so that when the mill stone turns, the flour is pushed towards the outside and is squeezed out.
How Winchester City Mill works - the grinding process
We mill English wheat and produce 20-30kg of flour per hour. Our mill stones only produce wholemeal flour as the whole grain seed passes between the stones. Historically, millers sieved the flour to produce whiter grades for the wealthy.
The stone floor
