NutriMill Harvest Grain Mill Review After 2 Years
A grain mill can be such a helpful tool in the kitchen if you want all of the benefits of milling your own grains. But, they are a significant investment, and you want it to be worth it. We share our genuine NutriMill Harvest Grain Mill Review after owning ours for around 2.5 years.
Spoiler alert, we love it and would highly recommend it for the home cook.
Manual Hand Mill vs. Electric Grain Mill (Our Back Story)
Interestingly, we’ve been milling our own grains for a solid decade now, but not always with an electric grain mill like the NutriMill Harvest. For us, it started with purchasing the Wonder Mill Junior Deluxe Grain Mill and milling grains by hand.
At that time, it was just Jim and I with an infant. We were at the beginning stages of our real food and homesteading journey, were gung-ho about all of it, and had a lot more time on our hands than we do now.
We loved that we wouldn’t be dependent on power with the hand mill, and it became a hobby of sorts to gather around the grain mill and grind what we needed for our sourdough that week. Slow food at its finest.
And we still have and use that Wonder Mill regularly. But after 3 kids, we noticed the trend that food consumption was going up, and time was becoming an increasingly rare commodity. It was time to look into adding an electric grain mill to our kitchen.
After much research, we landed on the NutriMill Harvest Grain Mill, and it’s been a phenomenal addition to our home kitchen. Let’s get into it!
Why Mill Your Own Grains?
Chances are, if you’ve landed here, you know many of the benefits of milling your own grains. But here are firsthand benefits we’ve seen from years of milling grains at home.
1. Greater Nutrition – Very quickly after grains are milled, they begin losing nutritional value. Yes, you can refrigerate or freeze ground flour to slow this process down. But if you want peak quality and nutrition, fresh ground is the only way to go and will blow the pants off any store-bought option that’s been sitting on the shelf for who knows how long.
2. Stone Ground – Heat plays a crucial role in the milling process, and much is lost during industrial milling that prioritizes efficiency—even when starting with high-quality grains. Many home grain mills, like the NutriMill Harvest, utilize milling stones that operate at slow enough speeds so as to not overprocess grains or reduce the quality of the end product.
3. Bulk Storage – When properly stored in their whole form, grains like wheat berries can remain shelf stable and viable for years. Stocking up on grains in bulk has become an integral part of our homestead pantry strategy, increasing food security.
4. Reduced Cost – Along those same lines, buying in bulk helps you save. A 50 lb. bag of wheat berries is a way better bang for your buck than a 5 lb. bag. We purchase wheat berries in bulk once or twice a year from sources like Azure Standard or other local sources, and are able to buy high-quality, organic grains for less.
5. More Fun! – You can go to the store and pick up a bag of generic white flour. Or, you can experience the subtle taste and texture differences when milling hard red wheat versus soft white wheat. Our industrialized society has drifted far from our food, and a grain mill allows you bring that process—and entertainment!—right back into your home kitchen.
NutriMill Harvest Grain Mill – THE PRO’s
The Look
Plain and simple, the NutriMill Harvest is a good looking grain mill.
With limited counter space and because it’s an appliance that we’d be using multiple times each week, we wanted a grain mill that would live on our counter. And so, we wanted it be an appliance that looked good and blended into our homestead kitchen.
NutriMill offers other great mill options, like the NutriMill Impact or NutriMill Classic. Both of these mills have excellent reviews, work very similarly, and cost less than the NutriMill Harvest.
But where the NutriMill Harvest surpasses the others is with its looks. It’s a high-end looking grain mill at a lower price than many. This grain mill is made with sustainably sourced bamboo, and then you can pick the rim color to match the aesthetic of your space (we have the gold). They also recently came out with a NutriMill Harvest made out of walnut that’s darker in color.
I also really appreciate the size. It’s relatively small and doesn’t take up a lot of counter space (the actual dimensions are 7”x7”x13”), especially when we push it against the wall. It genuinely looks like it belongs on the counter, and it’s a piece that I wouldn’t even want to hide in a cabinet.
Speed
This was the main reason we decided to get an electric mill versus sticking with our hand mill. We needed something that could get the job done.
As someone coming from hand milling grains, the NutriMill Harvest is lightning fast. But in all reality, for a starter grain mill, the speed is good. We do batch sourdough cooking days where we’ll need 30+ cups of flour, and it can easily grind that amount in several minutes.
Ease of Use
The NutriMill Harvest is very simple to set up and use. It’s as easy as turning it on, pouring grains in the hopper, and watching the freshly ground flour fall into your bowl. There is a coarseness dial that you can adjust to grind the grains more or less coarsely.
One note here, we have accidentally made the mistake of pouring grains in our hopper before turning the mill on—that doesn’t work. When you do that, the milling stones get gummed or jammed, and you have to dump everything out and clean the machine. But it was a good lesson learned, and then we also found out how to clean the mill, which is also relatively simple.
THE CON’s
Noise
In the description on the NutriMill website, it describes the NutriMill Harvest as being whisper quiet. It’s not. Running this grain mill is quite loud. I always make sure to time grinding grains when nobody in our house is sleeping.
That being said, this isn’t a make-or-break for us. Our vacuum is also loud and we still use it. I just have to be more conscious about when I use it.
Fineness of Grinding
We are not professional bakers, and as a home cook, the texture of milling that it provides is excellent and very much meets our needs. In fact, it can grind significantly more finely than what we were able to do on our Wondermill Junior Hand Mill.
But, if you have some sort of commercial or cottage business or will be grinding flour all the time and are particular, I wouldn’t say the Nutrimill Harvest grinds to a powdery fineness like a bag of flour from the store. Even when the NutriMill is set to a fine setting, it doesn’t quite deliver the same quality as a bag of commercial flour.
Overall Thoughts
If you are a home cook, looking to up your game and nutrition, we would highly recommend the NutriMill Harvest grain mill.
It’s beautiful with the look of a professional mill and functions extremely well and efficiently, at a lower price point than many mills on the market. We fall into this home cook category and have been extremely happy with ours over the last two years.
If you are a professional chef or baker, you will likely benefit from a more professional or commercial option to achieve the powdery fine flour texture, with likely a quieter motor and faster speeds.
All in all, the Nutrimill Harvest is one of those investments that you should only have to make once that will benefit your family for years into the future. It’s been one of the best kitchen investments that we’ve made, and we are very selective on bringing new appliances into our home.
Do you have a grain mill? What has your experience been?
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