The Legendary Wheat Grind-off: A Photo Essay

The much anticipated Wheat Grind-off and CarbFest has come and gone.

Many thanks to Jenny Boyer and our participants for pulling together a fun informative evening! Kudos to all who brought such yummy carb-laden treats for our consumption. Special thanks to the flag-maker...fine start and finish flags!

The wheat, of course

In this corner we have Contestant #1: The cheaper-if-you-buy-five...K-Tec

In this corner Contestant #2: The large, the sleek, the favored...Nutrimill

Contestant #3 The I-may-be-small-but-I-still-get-the-job-done Hand Grinder

And in this corner Contestant #4: The Wonder Mill a.k.a. Whisper Mill

And finally Contestant #5: The "oldie-but-goodie" stone grinder, a.k.a The Church Grinder

The fearless organizer and the uninitiated operator

The dynamic duo

The father and son team

The confident old-hat

The willing conscript

 

A few of the judging audience and participants fortifying themselves

And they're off...to be compared, judged, handled, listened to, discussed and then to finally race to finish the whole can of wheat!

Here's how the scoring worked. Each grinder was judged and scored by each observer on eight qualities of fine grinding: Cost, speed, ease of use, ease of cleaning, batch capacity, noise, quality of coarse grind (cracked wheat) and quality of fine grind (flour). Then the scores were totaled.

The winner is...Nutrimill...[and the crowd goes wild with cheering]...[the applause is deafening!] (Good thing we had those fluorescent orange ear plugs.) We loved that the wheat could be pre-loaded, no fussing over carefully feeding it a few kernels at a time, and that the batch capacity was great. We loved how easy it was to clean, though we're not sure if the cleaning-man is included in the price or not.

The very close 2nd place goes to the Wonder Mill. Great speed, good capacity, nice fine flour. We know why the name was changed from the misleading Whisper Mill, though. Extra points that one piece was missing but it still worked fine.

The Church Grinder did the best for price...free!...of course. You can borrow it any time; just bring it back in good order and clean.

Surprisingly the Hand Grinder did very well in several categories...price, noise and cracked wheat. And if the power goes out we'll be lining up for the privilege of its use.

Good sports, one and all

And the lucky winner of the ground flour...drumroll...Ellen King (me!).

Related Posts:
Wheat! Find out all you need to know and get the recipes.
Breadmaking by Apryl 
Check out a few more pics at Jennie's blog.

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