48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great all purpose mill, October 15, 2009
This review is from: Miracle Electric Grain and Flour Mill - ME300
I was searching for a flour mill that could grind all types of grain, not just dry wheat and other easy to grind grains. I wanted a mill that could deal with the toughest of the tough. This was very hard to find. Most affordable electric flour mills can only mill dry hard grain and are damaged by other types of grain. My search ended with this mill. I was a little nervous to buy it because of the lack of customer reviews for it. After using it everyday for quite a while now, I have to say that I'm very satisfied so far. This mill has been able to handle everything I've tried with it. It will even handle moist and oily grain which would damage most other flour mills in this price range.
Moist or oily grain takes a little longer to grind than dry grain, and you can't fill the hopper up like you can with dry grain, because it will clog if filled too high. If it ever clogs, it won't damage the mill. You just disassemble the flour mill attachment and clean it, so it's no big deal. To grind highly moist or highly oily grain, you slowly add the grain to the hopper one tablespoon at a time while it's running, keeping the hopper and feed tube mostly empty. This way it can grind continuously without clogging. The wetter or oilier the grain is, the slower you should feed the hopper. Normally, if I have wet grain, I dry it prior to grinding it. This way it grinds faster, and I can fill the hopper completely and let it run unattended until done.
This mill can grind continuously, hours on end. If it ever overheats it automatically shuts off, preventing damage to the mill's internal parts. If this ever happens, you simply wait a few minutes for it to cool down, and then press the reset button on the bottom of the mill and you're good to go.
This grain mill uses a heavy duty conical burr to grind the grain. It has 16 grind settings from super fine to super coarse. Setting 16 is so course that most grain just falls right through unground, while setting 1 produces dust. It's a fantastic range, far better than most of the other mills available.
The motor base is completely separate from the flour mill parts. The motor base is never exposed to any flour. The flour mill is actually just an attachment to the motor base. This makes cleaning really easy. You can completely remove the flour mill parts, easily disassemble them, and clean every part exposed to the flour in just a few minutes.
The noise level is very minimal. You can easily talk over the noise without raising your voice. It's much quieter than my coffee mill, my blender, and my vacuum cleaner. My blender is easily about 4 times as loud. Most other mills in this price range are about as loud as a small vacuum cleaner or blender.
The speed of this mill is the only downside that I could see. It's a little slower than some of the other mills in its price range. However, nearly all the other mills are designed only for wheat flour and similar grain and cannot grind many herbs, spices, moist grains or oily grains without being damaged, so this slightly slower performance is offset by the fact that it can grind a wide variety of items and the fact that it's not nearly as loud as the other mills. Pretty much anything that can fit into this mill can be ground, even things like coffee beans, herbs and spices, you name it, it can do it. Pretty much none of the other mills are that versatile.
This is an open system mill. Some of the other mills are closed systems, and need to be for a good reason. They operate at extremely high speed and would send flour dust all over the place if they were not closed systems. This mill is different. It operates at a low 100 RPM using a geared down motor, meaning it grinds with power rather than speed. This has two benefits. One is that flour is not blown all over the place. It falls directly into the bowl below. The other benefit is that the conical burr used to grind the grain doesn't get nearly as hot, and this better preserves the nutritional content of the grain.
The motor base can be used for other optional attachments. There's a wheatgrass juicer attachment, a salad maker attachment, and a meat grinder/mincer attachment available. I don't own any of these yet, but it's nice knowing they are available if I want to expand the use of the motor base. The motor base is also available from some retailers as a separate product without the attachments, so if it ever fails and its beyond warrantee, it's nice to know you can purchase just the motor base.
I highly recommend this flour mill to anyone wanting an all purpose mill. If you just want to make wheat flour, there are other flour mills with a little faster performance, but if you're like me and you need an all purpose mill that can grind pretty much anything, this is clearly the best buy for the money. It's not too noisy, the price is good, it's very easy to clean, plus with the other attachments available for the base, it can be used for other purposes as well.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great mill for making bean flour or dal flour, December 18, 2009
This review is from: Miracle Electric Grain and Flour Mill - ME300
ME 300 Miracle Electric Flour Mill
Having used this mill several times now over the past few months, I can recommend it highly. I bought this particular mill since I frequently grind raw or toasted dal (beans) to make various South Indian curry powders. I had owned a series of small grinders over the years; all of them became unusable after a couple of years not because of motor failure but due to the blades getting dulled and eventually useless from grinding dal. My research before buying this mill led me to buy a mill that has a steel burr action. Several reviewers in various websites had noted that ceramic burr mills get clogged frequently if used to grind beans or dal. I choked on the price of most of the steel-burr mills (mostly $500 and up), but this mill is about half the price of the other mills I looked at in its class.
This mill is powerful, well designed, has multiple grind settings, is only moderately noisy, and is extremely easy to clean. The instructions (which are better written than most) tell you not to run it more than 15 minutes continuously, but I have found that even at the finest grind setting, it will produce about 2-3 cups of flour within that time. It doesn't produce an ultra-fine powder, but its finest setting does produce a flour of the consistency of commercially available whole-wheat flour. If you run the ground flour through the mill a second time, the result will be even finer. I recommend this mill highly.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good unless you want a fine grind w/ no sifiting, December 30, 2009
This review is from: Miracle Electric Grain and Flour Mill - ME300
Pros: Fairly quick grinding, easy to assemble/disassemble and clean, small and light and easy to store, reasonably quiet.
Cons: I ground soft white wheat berries on the finest setting but still had to sift *twice* to get close to the fineness of my favorite commercial brand, King Arthur. It was still quite gritty.
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