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Flour Milling And Its Uses Essay

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Flour milling

History of flour milling

Flour milling is believed to have been around since the prehistoric days, (Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, 2015) states back around 9000’s B.C. crude flour was being made by crushing and grinding wild grains between rocks. As humanity developed people began using mortar and pestles to grind grains and seeds into crude wholemeal flour. A mortar and pestle is a very simple but useful device that is a narrow and deep bowl and a solid club-like object that relies on the brute strength of the user to crush the objects into a fine powder or paste. Developments in this technique lead to a new devices such as saddle quern stones, this is a two piece stone device that is set up that the base stone is concaved with a large stone on top that is oscillated back and forth along the curve to grind the grains, and later lead to rotary hand quern stones. Evidence of the rotary hand quern being used goes back 7500 years ago and is still being used by many villages throughout Asia and Africa. As communities developed and grew these hand operated quern stones were not producing enough flour for the amount of man labour that was being applied in the process, so larger stones were being used that had an increased capacity, that large sturdy animals like oxs, would operate.

Throughout time the main concept of flour milling has remained constant, even with the modern advancements in this field, there is still the concept of grinding the grains or

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