Chapter 491 - 30: Sweet Potato Flour (Part 2)
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The old machines at the flour mill were indeed a bit old, but still usable. The smaller sweet potatoes didn’t need to be chopped; they just needed to be poured into the top of the machine, which had two modes of grinding: coarse mixing and fine milling.
Feng Xing did some research and decided to start by coarsely milling a few white potatoes. The milling machine made a noise like a cement mixer as it chopped the whole sweet potatoes into irregular chunks. After Zhuo Feng and Xiao Xian caught them in a bucket and inspected them, Zhuo Feng wondered:
"Isn’t it right to peel them before processing?" He was worried that the broken skins would affect the appearance of the flour.
"The nutritional value of sweet potato skins is high, and besides, we’ll process them finely later, at which point those skins will be long gone," Xiao Xian calculated that if they had to peel them before making flour, the cost of labor would be astronomically high.
After coarse milling, it was time for the fine grinding. The sweet potatoes were turned into a mushy state, looking no longer like sweet potatoes but more like fruit pulp.
After milling, they would use clean water and gauze-lined large buckets (both the gauze and large buckets were borrowed from nearby farmers without cost, directly exchanged for a few pounds of sweet potatoes) to filter out the unusable sweet potato residue, leaving most of the starch in the buckets lined with gauze.
This task was not easy to talk about, and even harder to do. For sixty pounds spread across six piles of sweet potatoes, the borrowed buckets were not enough; they used every pot and bowl from home as well. Processed during the day and left to settle overnight, the next morning they discovered that the starch had separated: water on top, sweet potato flour on the bottom. After draining the water, the flour, cement-like, stayed at the bottom of the containers.
This was not yet finished sweet potato flour. Feng Xing went to the city to buy several clean bed sheets, borrowed some bamboo stakes used for drying vegetables, laid out a few benches, and spread out the still damp sweet potato flour under the sun to dry, much like making rice dumplings. By the end of July, the sun was fierce; after one day, the sweet potato flour had dried, turning into dry granules similar to those sold on the market. The first batch of self-processed sweet potato flour from Yanqing Farm was successfully made.
Zhuo Feng collected the dried sweet potato granules and weighed them. Taking the flour mill’s sweet potato to flour conversion ratio as a reference and comparing it to their own traditionally made sweet potato flour, they were left speechless.
"The flour mill’s ratio is about ten pounds of sweet potatoes to roughly one pound of sweet potato flour. Our sweet potatoes, especially the older batch, have different yields depending on the variety. The Purple sweet potato has the highest yield, about two and a half pounds from ten pounds. Even the poorest yielding baked sweet potato has a yield of one pound eight ounces. The new batch of sweet potatoes has an even more astonishing yield; roughly ten pounds of new Purple sweet potatoes can produce four pounds of flour. Baked sweet potatoes can also yield about two and a half pounds of flour." The numbers exceeded all three of their expectations.
As the farm’s sweet potato volume increased, the price dropped; wholesale prices were roughly two yuan per pound, and Purple sweet potatoes were better, but few people ate them, about three yuan per pound. The most common sweet potato flour on the market was eight or nine yuan per pound. And that was without mixing in other flours. According to the flour mill workers, no farmer would be foolish enough to sell 100% sweet potato flour; the most common practice was to mix it with regular flour at a one-to-one ratio.
Calculating the profits, a pound of Purple sweet potato flour could earn double the money than a pound of Purple sweet potatoes. Transforming from a single agricultural product to an agricultural by-product could result in such a high profit margin, something both Zhuo Feng and his wife had not anticipated.
After they had calculated the profits, Zhuo Feng found the courage to return to the flour mill, "Five hundred pounds is fine, five hundred pounds it is. Wait until they see our sweet potatoes’ conversion rate, I’m sure their eyes will pop out, and they’ll be begging us to let them process our sweet potatoes."
Xiao Xian was also secretly pleased. On the night the sweet potato flour was ready, the aunt and nephew duo got to work in the kitchen, using the flour to make vegetable dumplings. The dumplings made from six different types of flour each had a distinct texture. The newly harvested sweet potatoes had more sweetness and stickiness. The early-harvested sweet potatoes were more refreshing to eat, and with the color of the Purple sweet potato flour, a pot of dumplings contained the green of the vegetable leaves, the purple of the Purple sweet potatoes, the yellow of the white potatoes, embellished with some chopped scallions and dried shrimps. As soon as they were out of the pot, they were devoured by the three busy people.
After dinner, Xiao Xian went back to his room to do his summer homework, and Zhuo Feng packed and stored the sweet potato flour. This six bags of home-processed sweet potato flour; she didn’t plan to sell them but keep them for eating or as a souvenir.
"The sweet potato business has had a good start. As for the pickled sweet potato leaves, I don’t need to rush back to Shandong to ask Mom. A few days ago when I took some sweet potatoes to the baked sweet potato grandma, she mentioned that she pickles sweet potato leaves. She said her family also pickled the tender sweet potato leaves they harvested in previous years. I brought some back, and those we ate with the dumplings earlier tasted good." One piece of good news after another made Zhuo Feng even more excited.
In the following days, Feng Xing and Zhuo Feng first took the unsold old sweet potatoes from the warehouse to process into flour, then found some local farmers to help dig sweet potatoes and cut sweet potato leaves. By mid-August, things on the farm were bustling. The processed sweet potato flour was stacked bag by bag in an empty room, and the sweet potato leaves were pickled with the help of deft sweet potato roasting aunties, her daughters-in-law, and daughters.
"Everything is ready except for the east wind," on the eve of the 10th of the solar calendar August, a small meeting was held at Yanqing Farm, "What’s left now is to sell these agricultural by-products."
This time, Feng Xing had the chance to show off, "No need to worry this time, I’ve already thought of someone who can help us sort out the sales problem." (To be continued. If you like this work, you are welcome to Qidian (qidian.com) to vote for monthly tickets and recommendation tickets; your support is my greatest motivation.)
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