I used to have one but I have long since lost it. I do not know if there is one available online. For what it’s worth, there is not much to it.

Here are my basic tips.

Don’t grind beans or popcorn. Turn the mill on before adding the grain to the hopper (I did it wrong in the video). After you turn the mill on, turn the hopper just until the stones touch and then back it off a notch to get the finest setting. Don’t put too much in the hopper at once because when they stones start to heat up they will start to touch and grind. Do it in little batches and check in between to make sure the stones are still not touching.

The Komo website in Germany is:

http://www.frischmahlen.de/en/mills/

Thanks for your help

I hope you have managed to clean your mill stone. The same happened to me yesterday.

Fortunately I managed to fix it. Here is how…

I bought a steel wire brush (very thin wire) and brushed it all very carefully and all the the glazing was removed. It takes time, but you will eventually manage to get the stones back to its original state.

I realised that this glazing can happen more often if:

- your calibration is too thin,
- you are grinding more than 3 pounds uninterruptedly,
- your grain is not totally dry,
- you are grinding corn, or
- you are grinding barley (less often than corn).

Another think I find interesting to mention is to do with grinding corn. FIRST ONE MUST USE THE COARSEST CALIBRATION SO AS TO CRACK THE KERNEL,THEN GRIND AGAIN USING THE INTERMEDIATE COARSENESS, AND THEN GRIND AGAIN USING THE THIN COARSENESS.

If you don’t do it you will:

- wear your mill stone more quickly,
- get your mill stone glazed more often,
- heat up the electric motor,
- may get the large kernel locking the two stone plates. The mill will then have to be disassembled to release the plates. The way to do it is simple.

- disconnect from electricity mains,
- get the mill upside-down and remove all the kernels,
- put it back hopper up,
- unscrew the hopper towards the high coarseness calibration, and go on, anticlockwise until the hopper disassembles from mill body; it is now possible to see the round burr under the hopper,
- remove the round plastic structure holding the lower burr and the upper mill stone to reveal the lower mill stone pate,
- Now you can see both stones and you should be able to remove the clogging kernel and also brush the stones.

I hope this info is useful to all.

This is indeed a nice blog.

I am having some problems adapting my personal recipes using EXCLUSIVELY whole wheat flour. I have added 20% gluten and even eliminated other cereals such as rye and barley, but my bread is still collapsing a little in the centre. Probably most of you had the same problems when you shifted towards whole wheat flour…

Brian… thanks for your great site and information, very helpful!

I’m hoping to buy one and then blog about it on my site http://thenourishingcook.com. Reading this makes me think that being a distributor of these would be the way to go! lol

In the book “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee he mentions briefly that milled flours are aged to help with gluten development. That is the only place that I’ve seen that statement. Everyone else talks about using fresh milled flour for breads. What gives?