Does anyone use cracked corn instead of corn flour? If so-how?

[davdear]

I have seen many corn whiskey recipes that use cracked corn but it seems like most distillers are grinding their corn to flour with a hammer mill and using it that way. Is this because it would be too difficult to cook a large batch of cracked corn mash and stir it off the bottom properly? Or maybe you just get more out of the corn when it is flour? It seems commercial equipment is not built to handle cracked corn mash. If you have any knowledge about this I would love to hear it. Thanks!

[Silk City Distillers]

Cooking cracked corn generally takes significantly longer, has lower overall efficiency, and tends to create batch consistency issues as you have no control over the milling process.  Pre-cracked grain is also subject to spoilage and moisture issues, and in some cases it's the lower quality grain that's getting cracked.

There is zero reason why cracked corn is better, only that it's generally available.  If you have the ability to crack corn yourself, you probably have the ability to mill it finer.

Can you make it work?  Sure.  We ran using farmer-milled corn for a few years.  He hammer milled it for us using a slightly smaller screen than he used for general cracking.  As long as your agitator isn't undersized, you would be fine.  We used direct steam injection, so we didn't really have issues with corn sitting on the hot jacket at the bottom of a tun and gelling though.

Just to be clear, most of us are not milling to "flour".  For us, it's more like grits.  Moving to a hammer mill was a game changer for us, pay itself back in less than a year.