Bringing your own groundnuts to the mill
How custom pressing works at our Salem mill: what to bring, how long it takes and what you take home.
A morning at the mill
From the first sack of groundnut at 6 am to the bottles settling in the sun.
The mill wakes at 6 am. Before the chekkus are switched on, Kavitha checks the day’s groundnuts by hand, rubbing a fistful to look for broken or mouldy kernels. Anything doubtful is set aside.
The chekku is loaded with about 15 kg of shelled groundnut. As it turns, the pestle grinds the nuts into a thick paste. A few handfuls of palm jaggery go in with sesame, and a little water is sprinkled on to help the oil separate. After about 90 minutes, oil begins to pool and is ladled out into steel drums.
What is left is the oil cake, pinnakku. We sell it to dairy farmers nearby as cattle feed, so nothing from the seed is wasted.
The fresh oil is cloudy. It goes into steel drums on the terrace, where it sits in the sun for three days. The solids sink, and the clear oil is drawn off from the top and bottled. Each bottle gets a label with the date it was pressed.
