I’ve looked at grinding mills for some time now but they are super expensive! I want one to use as a teaching aid for kids at a pioneer museum we volunteer at during the summer. So after a bit of online research, I decided if the American Indians of old and Latino population of old could grind their grains using two rocks… then surely I could come up with something myself! Aka for free!
Fortunately my Montana house came complete with a really nice selection of huge river rock landscaping stones that I often use for crafting purposes lol. So out to the garden I went. I found the perfect stones. The first fit my hand perfectly like it was made for grinding, pounding and pummeling grains into powder! One down and one to go! Then I remembered seeing a rock that looked like a footprint in the sand on the beach! Right where the heel of the foot would be it is nice and concave already! Just like a footprint in the sand! Perfect! I have a small grinding bowl to go with my pestle!
Now, since these have been outside and are just normal everyday river rocks in a garden… I need to sanitize them and get them ready for food processing! Back to the internet. I decided to first soak them in a very heavily concentrated solution of salt water. Salt water should cleanse and kill anything that may be in the rocks that nature may have produced that might be a problem.
Next is to rinse (giving a good scrub with my dish scrubby), dry, and grind some salt into the rock. This will prepare the surface for grinding but also further sanitize. Also since it’s just salt anything that may leech into the grains/flour that we grind later won’t be harmful! (For example I wouldn’t want to soak it in a solution of bleach water or something like that for fear that the chemicals would leach into the food we will be making)
Next is to further prepare the stones with some white rice. By grinding the white rice we can see the color of the rice powder. Keep on grinding till the powder is a nice clean white color to know we don’t have any loose small grains of sand/rock being produced from the mill. This is the same process used to prepare traditional Mexican mortar and postal stones.
Fortunately the rock I chose did not take much preparation as it was not super porous like lava rock for example 🙂 and within minutes I was grinding some rice into rice flour. This took about 5 minutes to produce about a tablespoon worth of a course grind rice powder. It honestly doesn’t take much muscle power as you just rotate the pestle rock around in circles and the scoop the rice back into the middle and rotate again over and over. The weight of the pestle rock does most of the work for you. To get it started tho, you lightly tap and push the grains with the pestle rock to get them to start to break open some and then commence the rotation. A deeper bowl might work better for larger quantities but for my purposes this rock is exactly what I wanted and it was free!
Remember those walnuts we prepared last fall? Well I still have some left to crack open and eat! (Amazing there are any left lol but I try to dole them out like little precious nuggets of gold so they last all year!) Not only will this make a great grinding mill for demonstration purposes… yep you guessed it… but I plan on using it as a nut cracking rock too 🙂 which goes hand in hand with my #1 rule of “things must have multiple purposes”! Yay! Fresh walnuts anyone? (Yeah… I’m not really gonna share any… get your own! Lol) Yum! My favorite! This is by far the best nut cracking set I have ever owned! Most store bought cracking sets won’t crack an English walnut and I usually use a rock and a hammer anyway lol now it’s two rocks! Which is awesome because my husband keeps stealing my little hammer!!!!
So with a bit of work (which I would have had to have done anyway with a traditional stone style purchased mortar and pestle set) I have a completely free and very authentic pioneer style kitchen tool.
Now I am sorta wondering if I didn’t accidentally find an American Indian artifact in my garden by accident lol because it seems like these two rocks were made for working together like this and hardly any preparation was needed at all! We do live in an area highly populated by many tribes historically speaking (and present day come to think of it) and even have cave hieroglyphs very close by! Even Lewis and Clark walked these lands! But I seriously doubt it being a true artifact, I mean what are the actual chances of that lol… I just have a very good imagination I guess!
***As a post note: my husband has been cracking up laughing over what I am now calling my “kitchen rocks” and the fact that I was using my soup ladles to make snow balls with my grandson outside this winter (which made awesome snowballs BTW!) lol … apparently I don’t have a normal concept of outside tools vs inside tools lol … but I do have lots of fun! 🙂
Conestoga Chuck 