The long grind

Ever since human beings turned to domesticating crops and farming from the Early Neolithic period onwards, wheat, and therefore bread, has been a staple part of our diet. Pre-historians will tell you about emmer wheat, a rough primitive form, which can be found conserved either by carbonisation, or revealed in tell-tale 'negative' impressions left in prehistoric pottery (caused by the wheat grains being included in the clay prior to firing and being burnt off in the kiln – leaving a grain impression). As crops developed we got the more reliable and productive varieties that we know today, but the essence of how to process the product has remained essentially unchanged.

In the Dotton programme, viewers saw Tony hand over the hard graft of grinding grain to produce flour to digger Matt Williams. Matt took getting on for two hours of hand grinding to make a small bag of flour – evidence of the great advantage to be had from the introduction of watermills, which can produce the same amount in about two minutes.

But why was it worthwhile for our ancestors to put so much effort into grinding grain for bread and other food products? And what exactly is the process involved?

Wheat grains contain a high level of energy, which is captured within their structure in the form of starch (a carbohydrate) and a variety of proteins. Wheat also contains vitamins, such as B and E, together with some valuable antioxidants. The benefits of eating all of the components of the 'whole grain' are often advertised by household breakfast cereal brands.

In order to get flour to make bread, biscuits and cakes, the grain needs to be crushed to extract the powdery endosperm (the flour part). The grinding process was originally done by crushing the grain on a flat stone with a second, hand-held stone. This developed over time into the familiar quern stones known to be in common use in Britain from at least the Iron Age.

There are two principal kinds of quern stones: the saddle quern and the rotary quern. The former is so named because it comes to look like a saddle as a result of the grinding motion of dragging the hand stone forwards and backwards across it. The rotary quern employs a circular grinding motion.

As with so many technological developments, the Romans introduced querns on a larger industrial scale. These were powered by everything from people (often slaves) and animals to water. The Normans, who fully appreciated the importance of the mill, even fortified some examples after their conquest of Britain.

The milling process involves a standing stone milling wheel. This supports the grain, which is slowly introduced through a hole in a revolving top stone. The friction between the two surfaces grinds the grain, which breaks the structure of the grain. The resulting meal, or coarsely ground material, is forced to the edge of the stones and deposited around the outside of the wheel for collection. Sieving to remove the components of the whole grain provides white flour, whereas leaving the untreated crushed meal in the mix produces fibre-packed brown flour.

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