The Day's Grind...

                                 
                                  Some folks say a tramp won't steal
                                  But I caught two in my cornfield. 
                                  One had a bushel,
                                  The other had a peck.
                                  One had a roastin' ear tied around his neck.

                                        Lloyd "Cowboy" Copas

My dent corn, the entire fifty foot row of it, produced a good yield this past fall. Last year was a crop failure, due in part to a poor choice of seed corn. This past spring I planted a row of "Earth Tones" dent, a short season shelling corn that produced nearly two ears per stalk of mottled, earth tone hues. A year ago I received a corn grinder for a Christmas gift but because my corn crop failed I had no chance to try it out. In late September I shelled out over two gallons of variegated kernels and set aside the cobs for fire starters. Now that I had corn to grind, I was anxious to put my grinder to the test.

The journey from seed to meal was not without adventure, the first of which involved some pesky resident blue jays. As soon as the seed sprouted, the jays would pluck out the sprouts, cast them aside and feast on the kernels. To discourage the blue bandits, I placed a few short stakes down the row and strung mylar tape just above ground level. I knew the jays were after the seed, not the sprout and once the seed had sprouted to six inches or so, it would not be worth their effort to exhume what kernel remained. The strategy worked and over the summer the corn thrived. In fact most stalks were twelve to fifteen feet tall.

As the ears matured, I shucked and brought them inside by the wood stove to dry, which led to the next challenge: shelling the ears. My friend Jim Tunnell happened upon an old corn sheller at our local fair a few years back. He reconditioned the machine, made a few adjustments, and put the contraption to work. Jim also had a grain grinder and made his own flour and cornmeal ("Corn Prone," 3/23/2015). He kindly shelled and ground some of my corn crop that year, but Jim has moved to a different part of the state. The sheller and grinder went with him.

My brother improvised a corn sheller from a short tube of two inch PVC. He set a couple of screws in the tube, screwed them in so the tips protruded a short distance inside. Using an electric drill as a power source and an improvised drill bit on which he impaled the cobs, he spun the ears inside the tube where the set screws dislodged the kernels. Simple enough to build-- if you're handy. But tinkering is not my strong suit, so I resorted to the Old School, hands on method: grip and twist. I would "start" an ear by plucking loose a few kernels at the base of the ear. Then a strong grip with the left hand and repeated twisting with the right, I shelled the corn into a gallon plastic bucket. A dozen ears at a time was about my limit. And my hands were sore for only a day or two after each session. (For you manual corn shellers out there, having a good football game tuned in makes the task far less tedious.)

I discovered the "grip and twist" method yielded a considerable amount of chaff and bits of cob. To remove this excrescence, I went Old School again, waited for a blustery day. Come fall in this neck of the woods one needn't wait long for a stiff breeze to roll in from the southwest. The process is called "winnowing," and you don't have to be handy to put it to use. Holding the grain bucket a foot and a half above a five gallon bucket, I slowly poured the kernels and let the wind work. The chaff drifted away downwind while the heavier grain cascaded into the five gallon bucket debris free. Three or four transfers later and my corn was free of chaff and ready for grinding.

I assembled the grinder, followed the instructions step by step (by the way, if you're not handy, instructions always are) and readied it for action. My brother has a year's experience on me and gave me a tip or two.

He advised that a light grind for the initial run would make successive runs easier. After each run I tightened the grind plate's adjusting screw and cranked the crushed kernels through the auger another time. I experimented with the first hopper, a series of four runs, but found the grind was more like flour than meal.

I backed off the pressure until I found a courser grind to my liking. For the remainder of the first bucket I did a three series run and was satisfied with the result. The final run of each proved a workout. Even in the cold shed I broke a sweat on number three. I felt like an overweight hamster laboring away on its treadmill. Turning the crank proved quite an aerobic workout and my muscles ached for three days after.

My afternoon's sweat session produced nearly five quarts of fragrant meal. The result proved to be an earthy, gray color, I'm sure very much like the mortar and pestle ground product early Native Americans prepared as a foodstuff. And just as those peoples looked ahead to the next harvest, I've already set aside enough seed for this season's cornmeal crop.

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