There was a time during which most of the millstones in America were quarried in Ulster County, New York, about 70 miles south of me, from a formation of Silurian sandstone called the Shawangunk Grit. The stuff is almost entirely silicaceous, has varied grain size, and is reasonably easy to work despite the hardness of the individual grains. Nowadays, sport climbers come to the Shawangunk Ridge from the world over because the gritstone makes for outstanding routes - it grips like sandpaper even when it's wet. Often unbeknownst to the climbers, some routes ascend the walls of long-abandoned quarries, and cracked millstones litter the slopes. In this part of the world, gristmills, even with our hard winters, were able to turn year-round (perhaps with only the occasional freeze-up in winter), by the expedient of building the overshot wheel inside the building and channeling the stream through it. Our larger streams do not freeze from top to bottom and so keep some flow year-round. I've broken out some quite small streams with my ice axe and found liquid water on winter hiking trips, even ones with a five-foot snowpack. (Melting snow is time- and fuel-consuming!) From the earliest settlements, the Europeans built mills: gristmills, sawmills, felting mills, fulling mills, finery forges with water-driven trip hammers, bark mills, all are attested to in the seventeenth century in this part of the country. No daily grind for them! Where I live, owing to a geologic unconformity, there is no gritstone. My house's foundation rests on extremely fine-grained Ordovician siltstone, of no earthly use to anyone - it's unsuitable for just about everything because it crumbles. Over in Massachusetts, the same stuff is metamorphic and makes great slate for roofs and chalkboards, both nearly lost arts. The shale is overlain by the Devonian limestones of the Helderberg group, once very much in demand for cement because they have the perfect mix of lime and pozzolan. To this day, the LaFarge kiln in Selkirk, New York, runs night and day making high-quality hydraulic cement. The Helderberg group was also arguably the birthplace of modern paleontology - it's among the most fossiliferous rock on the planet, and was studied by luminaries such as Hall, Lyell, Huxley and Agassiz. The First Nations valued the stuff for its inclusions of chert. The Mohawks' name for themselves is Kaninen'kehá:ka : the People of the Place of Flint. One ambition I have for retirement, not that many years hence, is to hike from New York City all the way to the Adirondack wilderness, and to write a book about the experience. This video reminds me: don't forget to write about the quarries and mines! Palisades basalt, Hogencamp iron, Shawangunk grit, Catskill bluestone, Rosendale cement, Helderberg flint, Barton garnet, Tahawus iron and titanium, the minerals defined the places, and the scars of their exploitation, now decades returned to nature, are today's landforms. And all this ramble came about because I was shuddering at the idea of making a quern of concrete! There's a reason that millstones still are made of rock - nowadays, some sort of man-made composite embedding bits of emery, but the emery is rock nonetheless. I'm sure you're delighted that your videos make me think, even if they do make me want to ramble a bit!
Thank you so much for your posts! Your knowledge of your local geology is fascinating and makes me want to travel out to try my hand at making slate tiles and chalkboards! How interesting that they were using sandstone! JB
This was an awesome comment to read. So much knowledge! Thank you for sharing. I hope you do write a book one day! I'd be super interested in reading it.
Another useful usage of this Quern is to grind river sand to make rock dust. In general rock dust has a lot minerals. So, you can add minerals to your Bokashi with the rock dust. Very useful for people doing organical horticulture. Good Material Bro I just subscribe.
Great video. I'd be vibrating the flour afterwards, that way all of the grit will move to the bottom and you can skim the clean flour off the top. Also, the grind had to be done daily because the fats and oils within the grain would cause it to go rancid once pounded. Another tid bit, the longer you leaven your dow for, the richer and nutier the flavour. Looking forward to your next video :)
You could dry pan out the heavier material after you are done which would separate most of the larger heavier bits of contaminant out of the flour. It could also potentially get the smaller bits too. The great thing about it is you probably have everything you need to dry pan in the house and you can do it really fast so it’s a win win to add that step to your process. Good content great job!
Basalt or granite definitely better than cement stones. Actually some ground between 2 rocks like a mortar & pestle too. You know a really fine sieve would probably work better for separating out the sandpapery parts from the flour.. Putting your grinding stones on a chest high post would keep you from being bent over as you walked around the post. Also a cloth around base of post could catch the flour & grit.
Interesting stuff! I've wondered about this as well. Where I am the main stone around here is granite - obviously neolithic people had no tools to really shape it so by the looks of things they just found a flat-ish base piece and rubbed a smaller piece against it. Have you tried this sort of very basic millstone?
could you not use some basic Gravity separation to remove a good portion of grit? Either a similar method used to remove husks from the berries (using airflow) or perhaps even a dry panning method..
I would imagine that certain stones would produce more grit than others in the food. From the small amount of research I've done grit(gritstone) and granite are some of the most commonly used stones for a quern. I've also seen volcanic rock used. If you used these materials you might find yourself with less abrasive loaf of bread, as opposed to concrete. Regarding the actual design, I think some modifications could be made to make hand-turning a less "miserable" activity. I've seen primitive models that have more ergonomic placement of the turning handle, etc.
Mill ponds make sense Find the book "The Ugly American" and read about the broom handles Wondering if you could get rid if the dust by tossing it in the air and letting the dust fall out like you chaff from the wheat?
Another thing you could do nowadays is to take a detailed picture of both surfaces, you can tell the orientation of the picture with the bigger rock parts read like a fingerprint... With that done, having taken a few pictures you can sorta timelapse it, and see the changes.
I wonder why later civilizations didn't add a metal sheath (bronze, brass, or even steel) to the quern to prevent it from wearing down like that. I assume the softer metals would wear down too fast, and nobody would want to bite down on a chunk of steel...
@@GoodandBasic I was thinking to create my own rock cement. I am replacing the Lead with zinc oxide. The original formula is a book "a thousand and one formulas" by Sidney Gernsback
It would be cool to see if you could make a windmill from scratch like the ancient ones in this video th-cam.com/video/3qqifEdqf5g/w-d-xo.html to do that work for you, you could probably use wood bark for the fan blades attached somehow to a sapling shaft. I don't know how the hopper would work with something stuck down the middle though. You guys might have heard of The Iron Age tv show in the UK a few decades back, I think I remember them saying that they basically had to take turns having people spend their whole day grinding grain to make bread for everyone which blows my mind. I've never been able to find the whole tv series but here is a little summary/ looking back thing for the project th-cam.com/video/yzSwGQKpfpQ/w-d-xo.html
"All of their food"... I question that. I don't think you can live off just wheat flower for very long. I've searched a bit for the first use of the terms "Daily Grind", and most references I find talk about students in the late 1800s. Can you show me references that talk about the daily use of Querns, and the origin of the term "Daily grind" ? Or references that show that a quern was used to produce "all of their food" in a certain period or area?
Here's a starting article. journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/25564/29642 "All" is an exaggeration, but at some times of history it was an extreme majority of what people ate. JB
@@GoodandBasic Thank you! The article you linked outlines a few important details though: "The Daily Grind" in this article is an artistic liberty taken by the author of the piece, and only used in the title. To me, this signals only that the author made the connection to the more modern expression. Not that this is the origin of the term. So we're talking late 18th century Scots in Nova scotia here (they probably had them before that in other parts of the world ;-) ) The article does state the following: " According to Father D. J. Rankin, writing in the late 1920s, “it was customary for people to flock every evening to the nearest house where a hand mill was kept to get a peck or so of wheat ground to serve the following day”(41) " .. however a bit later it states: "In these published sources, there is substantial disagreement over how frequently querns were used in rural Scottish immigrant households. The Rev. MacGregor claimed that the inefficiency of this device contributed to its unpopularity and that consequently meals were frequently devoid of bread (127)" .. This contradicts the idea of "the daily grind" as referring to the use of Querns and the idea that it was "an extreme majority of what people ate". I can imagine that maybe when there were shortages, people were forced to only eat wheat/bread, but do you have any information on how this was the majority of what people ate? ( Who, where, and when?) Thank you.
I have a thought about that. Rotary querns were never developed in the New World, but much of what they were grinding was corn processed with alkali, which is ground while wet. This stuff would gum up a rotating mill terribly, so the back and forth grinding of the metate is actually better for the local grain. JB
Apologies if a million people have sent you this already but I saw this and thought of you: twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1117577646504681472 (making bread with Einkorn and actual ancient Egyptian yeast). "Food" for thought?
In part because wheat stores well even in just a pit in the ground, whereas ground flour stores much more poorly unless it's kept REALLY dry, which is very hard to do in a pre-modern environment. People would store and grind their own crop of wheat as they needed it, rather than have it ground by a communal mill in "industrial" quantities that would then potentially spoil before it could be used (since a large mill requires a certain [high] degree of throughput to be run per batch). Also, a communal mill owner would charge for the privilege of having your flour ground at their mill, so it wasn't economical for the average village dweller producing their own flour for their family. Large mills produced flour for trade to the towns and cities where the raw product was not produced.
![[ TEASER ] เงาะป่า - วงL.กฮ. | TMG RECORD](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/M4ObdFfcPww/mqdefault.jpg)
There was a time during which most of the millstones in America were quarried in Ulster County, New York, about 70 miles south of me, from a formation of Silurian sandstone called the Shawangunk Grit. The stuff is almost entirely silicaceous, has varied grain size, and is reasonably easy to work despite the hardness of the individual grains.
Nowadays, sport climbers come to the Shawangunk Ridge from the world over because the gritstone makes for outstanding routes - it grips like sandpaper even when it's wet. Often unbeknownst to the climbers, some routes ascend the walls of long-abandoned quarries, and cracked millstones litter the slopes.
In this part of the world, gristmills, even with our hard winters, were able to turn year-round (perhaps with only the occasional freeze-up in winter), by the expedient of building the overshot wheel inside the building and channeling the stream through it. Our larger streams do not freeze from top to bottom and so keep some flow year-round. I've broken out some quite small streams with my ice axe and found liquid water on winter hiking trips, even ones with a five-foot snowpack. (Melting snow is time- and fuel-consuming!) From the earliest settlements, the Europeans built mills: gristmills, sawmills, felting mills, fulling mills, finery forges with water-driven trip hammers, bark mills, all are attested to in the seventeenth century in this part of the country. No daily grind for them!
Where I live, owing to a geologic unconformity, there is no gritstone. My house's foundation rests on extremely fine-grained Ordovician siltstone, of no earthly use to anyone - it's unsuitable for just about everything because it crumbles. Over in Massachusetts, the same stuff is metamorphic and makes great slate for roofs and chalkboards, both nearly lost arts. The shale is overlain by the Devonian limestones of the Helderberg group, once very much in demand for cement because they have the perfect mix of lime and pozzolan. To this day, the LaFarge kiln in Selkirk, New York, runs night and day making high-quality hydraulic cement. The Helderberg group was also arguably the birthplace of modern paleontology - it's among the most fossiliferous rock on the planet, and was studied by luminaries such as Hall, Lyell, Huxley and Agassiz. The First Nations valued the stuff for its inclusions of chert. The Mohawks' name for themselves is Kaninen'kehá:ka : the People of the Place of Flint.
One ambition I have for retirement, not that many years hence, is to hike from New York City all the way to the Adirondack wilderness, and to write a book about the experience. This video reminds me: don't forget to write about the quarries and mines! Palisades basalt, Hogencamp iron, Shawangunk grit, Catskill bluestone, Rosendale cement, Helderberg flint, Barton garnet, Tahawus iron and titanium, the minerals defined the places, and the scars of their exploitation, now decades returned to nature, are today's landforms.
And all this ramble came about because I was shuddering at the idea of making a quern of concrete! There's a reason that millstones still are made of rock - nowadays, some sort of man-made composite embedding bits of emery, but the emery is rock nonetheless.
I'm sure you're delighted that your videos make me think, even if they do make me want to ramble a bit!
Thank you so much for your posts! Your knowledge of your local geology is fascinating and makes me want to travel out to try my hand at making slate tiles and chalkboards! How interesting that they were using sandstone! JB
This was an awesome comment to read. So much knowledge! Thank you for sharing. I hope you do write a book one day! I'd be super interested in reading it.
If you manage to produce some edible flour at some point, then you have to build an earthen oven to bake it in.
Making one of these for black powder. Thanks for the upload you gave me some ideas on methods
Another useful usage of this Quern is to grind river sand to make rock dust. In general rock dust has a lot minerals. So, you can add minerals to your Bokashi with the rock dust. Very useful for people doing organical horticulture. Good Material Bro I just subscribe.
Great video. I'd be vibrating the flour afterwards, that way all of the grit will move to the bottom and you can skim the clean flour off the top. Also, the grind had to be done daily because the fats and oils within the grain would cause it to go rancid once pounded. Another tid bit, the longer you leaven your dow for, the richer and nutier the flavour. Looking forward to your next video :)
Are you sure cement dust is heavier than wheat flour?
You could dry pan out the heavier material after you are done which would separate most of the larger heavier bits of contaminant out of the flour. It could also potentially get the smaller bits too. The great thing about it is you probably have everything you need to dry pan in the house and you can do it really fast so it’s a win win to add that step to your process. Good content great job!
Basalt or granite definitely better than cement stones. Actually some ground between 2 rocks like a mortar & pestle too. You know a really fine sieve would probably work better for separating out the sandpapery parts from the flour.. Putting your grinding stones on a chest high post would keep you from being bent over as you walked around the post. Also a cloth around base of post could catch the flour & grit.
I would've put a rotating ball on the end of that handle to make it easier to turn
that's a nice queef loaf
Interesting stuff!
I've wondered about this as well. Where I am the main stone around here is granite - obviously neolithic people had no tools to really shape it so by the looks of things they just found a flat-ish base piece and rubbed a smaller piece against it. Have you tried this sort of very basic millstone?
I like your honesty "ugh... that's nasty"
A stone mortar and wooden pestle avoids most of the grit.
Alternatively, just make gruel, screw the grinding.
Originally, when you first used a set of stones, you ran it for several days, and trashed everything that you put through it to dislodge the grit.
could you not use some basic Gravity separation to remove a good portion of grit? Either a similar method used to remove husks from the berries (using airflow) or perhaps even a dry panning method..
I would imagine that certain stones would produce more grit than others in the food. From the small amount of research I've done grit(gritstone) and granite are some of the most commonly used stones for a quern. I've also seen volcanic rock used. If you used these materials you might find yourself with less abrasive loaf of bread, as opposed to concrete.
Regarding the actual design, I think some modifications could be made to make hand-turning a less "miserable" activity. I've seen primitive models that have more ergonomic placement of the turning handle, etc.
They must've been so thankful when millers and commercial milling came about.
Mill ponds make sense
Find the book "The Ugly American" and read about the broom handles
Wondering if you could get rid if the dust by tossing it in the air and letting the dust fall out like you chaff from the wheat?
Liked the video. Next time no iodized salt, kills the starter and no city water, chlorine and fluoride also kill starter.
Another thing you could do nowadays is to take a detailed picture of both surfaces, you can tell the orientation of the picture with the bigger rock parts read like a fingerprint...
With that done, having taken a few pictures you can sorta timelapse it, and see the changes.
I wonder why later civilizations didn't add a metal sheath (bronze, brass, or even steel) to the quern to prevent it from wearing down like that. I assume the softer metals would wear down too fast, and nobody would want to bite down on a chunk of steel...
A guess: a metal guard may not have had an abrasive enough surface?
Even modern mills use stone wheels. Metal ones are called burr wheels and they don't make as fine of flour. JB
Metal filings are worse for you than grit
@@GoodandBasic I was thinking to create my own rock cement. I am replacing the Lead with zinc oxide. The original formula is a book "a thousand and one formulas" by Sidney Gernsback
It would be cool to see if you could make a windmill from scratch like the ancient ones in this video th-cam.com/video/3qqifEdqf5g/w-d-xo.html to do that work for you, you could probably use wood bark for the fan blades attached somehow to a sapling shaft. I don't know how the hopper would work with something stuck down the middle though.
You guys might have heard of The Iron Age tv show in the UK a few decades back, I think I remember them saying that they basically had to take turns having people spend their whole day grinding grain to make bread for everyone which blows my mind. I've never been able to find the whole tv series but here is a little summary/ looking back thing for the project th-cam.com/video/yzSwGQKpfpQ/w-d-xo.html
"All of their food"... I question that. I don't think you can live off just wheat flower for very long. I've searched a bit for the first use of the terms "Daily Grind", and most references I find talk about students in the late 1800s. Can you show me references that talk about the daily use of Querns, and the origin of the term "Daily grind" ? Or references that show that a quern was used to produce "all of their food" in a certain period or area?
Here's a starting article. journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/25564/29642
"All" is an exaggeration, but at some times of history it was an extreme majority of what people ate. JB
@@GoodandBasic Thank you! The article you linked outlines a few important details though: "The Daily Grind" in this article is an artistic liberty taken by the author of the piece, and only used in the title. To me, this signals only that the author made the connection to the more modern expression. Not that this is the origin of the term. So we're talking late 18th century Scots in Nova scotia here (they probably had them before that in other parts of the world ;-) ) The article does state the following: " According to Father D. J. Rankin, writing in the late 1920s, “it was customary for people to flock every evening to the nearest house where a hand mill was kept to get a peck or so of wheat ground to serve the following day”(41) " .. however a bit later it states: "In these published sources, there is substantial disagreement over how frequently querns were used in rural Scottish immigrant households. The Rev. MacGregor claimed that the inefficiency of this device contributed to its unpopularity and that consequently meals were frequently devoid of bread (127)" .. This contradicts the idea of "the daily grind" as referring to the use of Querns and the idea that it was "an extreme majority of what people ate". I can imagine that maybe when there were shortages, people were forced to only eat wheat/bread, but do you have any information on how this was the majority of what people ate? ( Who, where, and when?) Thank you.
I know you know what concrete is made of. Making it as a demonstration is one thing but actually trying to eat it... That was really stupid.
😆JB
I wonder how this type of quern compares to a mealing stone (metate) type in terms of work and quality of finished product.
I have a thought about that. Rotary querns were never developed in the New World, but much of what they were grinding was corn processed with alkali, which is ground while wet. This stuff would gum up a rotating mill terribly, so the back and forth grinding of the metate is actually better for the local grain. JB
UHmm cement and flour bread!!!
Apologies if a million people have sent you this already but I saw this and thought of you: twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1117577646504681472 (making bread with Einkorn and actual ancient Egyptian yeast). "Food" for thought?
How long does it take you to Grind the weet it into flour?
You should make gruel. Then progress to unleavened bread.
First... is what I would say if I was a basic TH-cam commenter just looking for attention and approval. So, first!
So what would you say if you were a good TH-cam commenter instead?
Here is a comment.
why did people all do their own grinding? why not build a communal mill?
They did. That's what windmills were for. It was still cheaper to do it yourself.
In part because wheat stores well even in just a pit in the ground, whereas ground flour stores much more poorly unless it's kept REALLY dry, which is very hard to do in a pre-modern environment. People would store and grind their own crop of wheat as they needed it, rather than have it ground by a communal mill in "industrial" quantities that would then potentially spoil before it could be used (since a large mill requires a certain [high] degree of throughput to be run per batch). Also, a communal mill owner would charge for the privilege of having your flour ground at their mill, so it wasn't economical for the average village dweller producing their own flour for their family. Large mills produced flour for trade to the towns and cities where the raw product was not produced.
I'm actually hoping up do a video on something closely related in the next week or so. JB
Fantastic, love your vids, real pleasure to get a response from you. :)
Thanks! JB