De Distilleerketel Windmill, Rotterdam
I took another trip to Rotterdam to see the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, this time with my design history class. This time, I decided to try again to visit the "only working windmill in Rotterdam," De Distilleerketel. Last time I was in Rotterdam, I tried to visit this windmill, but it was closed in the first few weeks of January.
Why was I so intent on visiting this windmill? I read about it even before I moved to the Netherlands in this NY Times article about new demand for the product of these windmills, flour, coming from immigrants especially from Africa (link here). Ironically for the country of windmills and milling grain, the only types of flour you can find in the supermarket are white wheat and whole wheat. Even looking in the health food store, you can only find maybe oat flour. So having baked with a ton of different flours in the US (spelt, barley, etc.), I was really missing this variety or whole grains.
Rotterdam itself is a rather modern-looking city. Like Eindhoven, a lot of it was bombed during World War II, so it has many examples of modern and contemporary architecture, including these cube houses designed by Piet Blom. Coming into Rotterdam, I really felt like a country bumpkin since it is truly a "big city" with lots of skyscrapers and a big harbor. In fact, I read that until 2004, Rotterdam was the world's busiest port for more than 40 year (Shanghai is now the busiest).
But in the Delfshaven neighborhood, one turn off the main road with trams clanking by, you enter a canal that really looks like "old Holland." The windmill is actually situated on the narrowest peninsula I've ever seen. So narrow, that it is only one building length across (so some lucky residents get to have water views on opposite sides!).
De Distilleerketel is on the tip of this narrow spit of land.
And inside is a tiny little shop surrounded by sacks of flour. The guy standing inside the wooden box is the miller, and he told me that he also is the miller at the Schiedam windmills. Those are the world's tallest windmills! He said they were nearby, and when I went back to Rotterdam station I looked on the subway map and apparently Schiedam is only 2 stops (i.e. a few minutes) away from Delfshaven! So De Distilleerketel can claim it's the only working windmill in Rotterdam, but Schiedam is pretty darn close. The customers at the window at the moment are from Africa, so what the NY Times article said was quite true. Indeed, when my friend pointed to something on their price list that she didn't understand, teff, he said that it is something only Ethiopians buy to make big pancakes that function as plates. Injera bread!!! (Also something I was introduced to in Cincinnati of all places.)
So what did I bring back to Eindhoven? In the back row, 2 kg of organic wheat flour, 2 kg of organic whole wheat flour, and in the front row, rye (roggemeel), barley (gerstmeel), spelt (speltmeel), buckwheat (boekweitmeel), and gluten flour. Meel means flour, as in meal like cornmeal. Mission accomplished!
