Interested in milling your own mesquite? If you live in southern Arizona, this is possible thanks to Desert Harvesters, a volunteer-run, grassroots organization based in Tucson, Arizona. They strive to promote, celebrate, and enhance, local food security and production by encouraging the planting of indigenous, food-bearing shade trees in water-harvesting earthworks, and then educating the public on how to harvest and process the bounty.

Since 2003 Desert Harvesters have been enabling folks to grind mesquite pods into delicious and nutritious mesquite flour at their local milling events in the fall. Their milling events are usually held from late September through November when the dew point has dropped. Click here for their calendar of events. This follows the summer mesquite pod harvest, and ensures that the pods have had a chance to dry well and will not reabsorb moisture from the humid summer monsoon season weather (the pods must be dry to run through the mill without gumming it up. Pods are sufficiently dry when they quickly “snap in two” when you try to bend them). Click here for more on mesquite harvesting and processing.

The main milling event and fundraiser for Desert Harvesters is coupled with a mesquite pancake breakfast at the Dunbar/Spring Organic Community Garden in central Tucson. This is a great opportunity for folks to taste the flavors of foods made from locally harvested wild produce, local organic gardens, neighbors’ kitchens, and local organic food outlets. Click here to see a video of the 2007 mesquite milling and pancake breakfast.

What is a hammermill? For those of you that have been wondering, a hammermill is an industrial mill for making flour. Desert Harvesters' community hammermill was purchased exclusively for making mesquite flour. The hammermill easily breaks up the mesquite pods and some of the hard seeds to produce quality flour. While not designed specifically for mesquite pods, it is the best tool they’ve found that will make mesquite flour in large quantities, while also saving a lot of time compared to labor-intensive hand grinding or blender methods. Their hammermill is available for your community’s milling event – it’s been mounted on a trailer to make it mobile.

Recipe courtesy of Desert Harvesters.