Recently, I've been attempting to grind and sift my own flour.
The grinding is straightforward with a Retsel Mil-Rite, an
excellent home stone buhr mill or my new Meadows 8-inch stone
mill. However, the mysteries of sifting the flour have been less
straightforward. A subsequent blog entry will deal with my
progress on grinding and sifting my own flour. The sifting
project motivates the need for measuring the ash content of my
flour. Ash content in general is the percentage of inorganic
matter in a sample of some material. It is used in many
different ways to analyze agricultural products, at least, based
on some cursory sampling of articles on the internet. About.com
says defines ash content as: The nonvolatile inorganic matter of
a compound which remains after subjecting it to a high
decomposition temperature. A traditional method for determining
ash content is to place a sample of known weight in a furnace at
high temperature (600F or higher) for a number of hours (12
hours, for example) such that all the w