More Sunflower Processes

What I have read about processing confectionery sunflower seeds is that you can separate husks from the edible part of the seed by running them through a stone mill. We happen to have a stone mill. We bought in the 1980s to grind wheat. It doesn't have a motor, just a hand crank, so it's not the preferred method to do just about anything. Still, for dealing with sunflower seeds, it seemed appropriate.

The method I read suggested opening the aperture of the wheels a bit, between and eighth and a quarter of an inch and grind away until you get seeds separating from husks. The stones are, indeed, adjustable. For me, it seemed that about an eighth of an inch worked well. As I turned the wheel and ground the husk, the seeds separated quite nicely. The photo on the left below is the result of processing a half filled bowl of seeds this way.

What is apparent from this is that the stone mill grinder does its job. Both parts fall down through the shoot. Clearly, this makes it easier to crack the seeds. What it doesn't do is separate the two parts. I ran one small batch through and sort of used a combined method of hand picking out the shells and blowing on the bowl lightly to see if that would separate the parts. It worked, but it was time consuming and messy. I had to do it outside and my shirt ended up covered with small bits of shell. The one problem I tried to avoid was loosing seed because I blew too hard. I'm not sure how effective it was.

I added a step with the larger batch of seeds. I had some quarter inch screen left over from another project. I first put the batch of cracked seeds on the screen. I actually tried to do too much at a time and so I had to work it around a bit. The screen caught the very biggest pieces of shell, about a third of the total batch. I dumped the part that was caught and did it one more time. That left about half of the total batch in the bowl below and, as far as I could tell, didn't leave any of the seeds on top of the screen. After this, I went outside and did my gentle blowing process again. Finally, I hand picked out the few remaining pieces of shell and whatever the other things were. The photo on the right is the result.

One thing is for sure, there isn't a lot of seed that results. It would take a lot of sunflowers to make a quart of seed. I understand now why you would need to dedicate acres to growing and good equipment for harvesting and processing if you wanted to do this economically. For us (well, me) this is just an experiment to learn about self-reliance. It's mostly just humbling to know how cheaply I can buy this stuff in the store.