My Review of the NutriMill Electric Grain Mill

I've had the chance to put my new NutriMill Grain Mill through its paces over the last couple of days. Here's what it looked like when I took it out of the box.

The NutriMill is larger than I expected it to be. It's nearly as large as my Kitchenaid stand mixer.

You load the grain in the top of the mill. Experienced users of the NutriMill will note that I had the ring of the hopper installed upside down in the following photo. Oops! As you can tell, I have giant amounts of mechanical aptitude.

The hopper prominently warns against grinding oily seeds. There is an extensive list of banned items in the owner's manual, including oatmeal of any kind, nuts, and sprouted grains/seeds. Luckily, my Wonder Junior Deluxe's sets of steel burrs and stone heads will work just fine for those materials.

When you turn on the NutriMill, you might be surprised by the noise. Picture, if you will, a Shop Vac.

Imagine the noise that would ensue if you attempted to vaccum up a pack of yowling feral cats with said Shop Vac. That is pretty much what the NutriMill sounds like.

Should that discourage you from buying a NutriMill? Well, that's up to you and your tolerance for yowling feral cats. The good news is that the NutriMill works quickly, so you don't have to listen to it for very long. In 60 seconds, I had ground enough wheat to make a loaf of bread. That would have taken me about 7 minutes of constant grinding with the Wonder Mill Junior. I enjoy the sound of the Wonder Mill Junior, though. There's something therapeutic about hearing those stone heads grind against each other. The NutriMill's yowling? Not so therapeutic.

The freshly ground flour is collected in the bowl at the bottom.

I set it to grind on its finest setting. The end result was indeed finer than what my Wonder Junior can achieve. I made both a loaf of bread and a batch of pancakes with the flour and they turned out wonderfully.

The only issues I had during my experimentation occurred when my legendary mechanical aptitude got involved. The manual instructs you to first mill 2 cups of grain and discard it. I dumped out my test batch of flour and got ready to grind more wheat. The problem was that I forgot to put the flour bowl back in before I turned on the mill. Flour sprayed everywhere! That flustered me enough that when I finally did get the bowl installed, I didn't slide it in all the way. By the time I cleaned up the resulting flour-fest in my kitchen, I more resembled a powdered donut than a happy homemaker.

My personal issues aside, the NutriMill does a great job. It is noisy but quick, and it produces very nice flour. I recommend it!

My Honey Loves Me

How can I tell?

He got me this as a combined birthday/Mother's Day present.

A NutriMill !

Isn't he thoughtful? (Nevermind the fact that I told him exactly what I wanted and in fact I ordered it myself.) He's a total gem, isn't he, ladies?

After the great electric grain mill disappointment of 2010, I've been making do with my Wondermill Junior Deluxe. It's great and all, but I only pull it out of storage every so often. Between changing diapers and homeschooling, grinding grain by hand is low on the list of things I need to do every day. I'm sure I'll use it a ton. Thanks, Hubby Dear!

Coming soon: My Review of the NutriMill 

Month Seven in Review and Month Eight Preps

Month Seven:

This month of my Prepping Plan featured a few bumps, namely on the grain mill front.

I bought a lot of food storage-related items this month. I have another 100 lbs of beans, 90 lb of wheat, and lots of odds and ends like drink mix. My food storage buckets seem to have multiplied all of a sudden. I wasn't aware that I had this many.

Buckets galore but we need so many more

I also bought a couple of packs of Can Organizers, which made neat work of one of my cabinets. I learned how to can meat and found out it wasn't so scary after all. I also made a first aid kit out of an Altoids tin for my purse.

Tall, dark, and handsome

Month Eight Preps:

I feel a lot of pressure to complete my food storage ASAP because the specter of high inflation looms ever larger, so next month will also be focused on that area. If I can get rid of some of the junk in my storage room, I plan on buying a nifty Shelf Reliance shelving system. It should really help maintain FIFO (first in, first out) when it comes to my canned goods. I also plan on buying a few more items to fill my shiny new shelves.

The weird thing about these Shelf Reliance organizers is that they don't come with a shelf across the top. That's too much space to waste so I'm going to figure out what kind of wood I need to buy and get Hubby Dear to cut a piece to serve as a shelf.

I also plan on getting a P-Touch labeler so that I can create neatly printed labels for all my storage containers. I've always wanted one of those, so I'm pretty excited about that purchase. That's it for Month Eight.

Do you have any preps planned for next month?

Coming Soon: 2010 in Review and Goals for 2011

This Post Should've Been a Review of an Electric Grain Mill...

I don't have one of these. Grrr....

If you have been following my Prepping Plan, you might have noticed that I was planning on getting an electric grain mill this month. My Wonder Mill Junior Deluxe works very well and it only takes about 7 minutes of cranking to get enough flour for a loaf of bread, but let's be real. I have four kids, I homeschool, and I have other uses for my time. If I'm going to regularly grind grain, I really could use an electric mill.   

After I posted about my experience with my hand mill last month (read about it here and here), the president of a certain big name grain mill company emailed me and offered me a very nice discount and some freebies if I would try out and review their electric model here on my blog. I was surprised and delighted. The mill was actually the one I was planning on buying, and the discount would enable me to buy it this month.

Well, the grain mill company didn't follow through on their offer and, as a result, I still don't have an electric mill. Now I have to buy a different type of grain mill just so I can thumb my nose at this company. I'm looking at getting a Nutrimill, unless that company decides to play with my emotions, too.

What are your experiences with electric grain mills? Do you have any recommendations or know of ones I should avoid?