Click on these little boxes with those funny German words and you will find out some details about the production of gruenkern! If your browser doesn't react, click on the same underlined terms within the text below!
This picture is entitled "So war's frueher" which means: That's how gruenkern was produced in the olden days.



In the olden days (up until the 1960s) gruenkern was produced like this: The spelt was cut with the Sichel into small bundles (Haempfele) of maybe about 50 stalks each. These little bundles were pulled through some kind of an iron comb which was mounted on a wooden chest, called the Reffe. By this method the ears were torn off and fell into the wooden chest(Reffe). The ears were poured into sacks and taken to the Darre which was a barnlike building containing a huge roasting oven. The ears were poured onto the gridiron under which a fire of beechwood was burning. After having reached a certain degree of roasting the beard was removed from the grain and what was left was this unique delicacy: GRUENKERN.

For Videos of the harvest of Grünkern click here!

And how is gruenkern produced today?
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The Reffe
can be seen below. It was a wooden chest with a big iron comb on top and had the capacity of about 10 cubicfeet. It had four handles so that it could be moved to the next heap of small bundles of gruenkern.

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Haempfele
were small bundles of spelt cut when in a green condition (i.e. the grain was still somewhat unripe). The bundles were laid down crosswise until the workers arrived with the Reffe.
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The Sichel
is probably similar to what is known as a sickle in English-speaking countries, a small cutting instrument by which only relatively few stalks could be cut at the same time. One had to bend down low in order to cut the stalks. And a farmworker had to do this several thousand times a day.
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