| The cleaning process begins. It takes several machines to separate the pure black wild rice grains from everything else. The first of these machines is a tall red box called an aspirator. It's like a modified vacuum cleaner. The aspirator takes advantage of the hull's light weight and the kernel's heavier weight. The mixture of hulls and kernels is dropped into the top of the aspirator.
Gravity pulls everything toward the bottom, slowed down by a series of sloping shelves that you can see in the window at the side of the aspirator. What you can't see is the rush of air that blows through the aspirator from the bottom out the top. This flow of air carries the light hulls out the top, leaving the heavier material to fall to the bottom. The loose hulls have been removed from the mixture at this point, so on to the next machine for more cleaning. |
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