Milling and grinding buckwheat

This is the hard part -- literally! Buckwheat is usually hulled and ground into flour in commercial mills. This old mill is still on the job after many decades.

I'm working on a practical method of dehulling buckwheat that an individual without access to commercial milling equipment can use. Once the hulls are off, a home grain mill or even a coffee grinder can make a nice flour from the seeds.


Buckwheat kernels aren't really grains like wheat or barley, but a type of seed, similar to sunflower seeds.The hulls are very tough, and depending on the type of buckwheat, they can taste bitter. Small buckwheat kernels which evade grinding are like getting unpopped popcorn kernels when you don't expect them. Unulled (whole) buckwheat kernels can be put into a coffee grinder to create a dark flour, but a lot of buckwheat hull in the flour is too much for the digestive system most of us have.

So it's easy to grow buckwheat, and pretty easy to harvest it, and once the hulls are off, the buckwheat (raw or roasted) isn't hard to grind into flour. 


If one wants a good quantity of non-gritty soft flour, then the hulls have to come off. Small kernels or pieces of hull are not only give the flour a bitter taste and an unpleasant mouth feel, but those hard bits are rough on the teeth and dental fillings. So it doesn't work to simply fill the hopper of a traditional home grain mill with unhulled buckwheat and crank it or hit the "grind" button. The buckwheat hulls are super-hard, so if the machine's not meant for heavy-duty grinding, there could be wear and tear or worse.

It helps to understand how grain mills work.  This site has some good basic info on common home mills.

Some buckwheat processors use a hammer mill (after which the copy paper company is named).

This flour is made by using a hammer mill.

For now, that's some basic information on milling buckwheat at home. I'll share more on this page when I have the usable method ready for illustrated demonstration. 

Source: the image of the old buckwheat mill comes from https://cheeseweb.eu/2016/10/ployes-a-culinary-tradition-in-madawaska-new-brunswick/