Milling lupins with a pasta maker machine

In an earlier post, I hypothesized that soaked lupin beans could be effectively dehulled with a pasta maker. Turns out, one of my co-workers has a pasta machine, so I finally got the chance to test this hypothesis. And it does in fact work, particularly after the beans have sprouted a little bit.

As is, the pasta machine is an improvement over hand de-hulling, but I think it could be improved. Set to maximum, the gap on this pasta machine is 2.5 mm, I'd like to try one with a 5 mm gap because this one kind of crushed the beans (although, I still think they'd make decent tempe in this state). The rollers are not grippy enough, (this would be less of a problem with wider spacing), you have to apply gentle pressure to the beans to get them to go through. The pasta machine lacks a hopper so beans have to be fed through fairly slowly and can't be piled up very high on the machine, if there were a hopper, the pressure of beans on other beans might be enough to make extra grip on the rollers unnecessary.

I don't think I'll actually end up using this method, because I suspect that dicing with a food processor will turn out to be cheaper and more effective, but it's certainly a viable strategy, and much preferable to hand hulling.