Traditional vs Pulverizer flour mills

There are two types of flour mills available locally: one is a traditional mill, and the other is a pulverizer mill.

Traditional mills looks like this:

In a traditional mill, grains are powdered by crushing between metal grinding plates. This process generates a lot of heat due to friction. The flour produced is a fine powder. However, its shelf life is only about 1–2 months. If the grains are properly sun‑dried, the shelf life can be extended to about 4 months. The flour needs to be sieved before use. To achieve finer powder, the flour can be processed multiple times, though this leads to a slight weight loss with each pass.

Pulverizer based flour mill is pictured below:

In a pulverizer mill, grains are cut into small pieces, and hammers are used to grind them. Blowers are employed to prevent heat generation and to collect the output powder. These mills are equipped with an attached sieve, so no post‑milling sieving is needed. The flour has a longer shelf life because less heat is generated. However, the flour isn’t as fine. Processing multiple times causes weight loss in the output due to the blower, but if a small amount of raw material is processed at a time, relatively fine powder can still be achieved first time.

Summary

Pulverizer‑based flour performs better in terms of health, shelf life, and quality—especially for chili powder. In a traditional mill, chili powder often gets burnt and turns dark. However, the flour produced by a pulverizer‑based mill tends to be a little coarse, especially for hard grains like jave wheat.

At Dhaanya, we make our powders using a pulverizer.