Primer on flour

[Delmonico]

To understand cooking you have to understand the groceries, one most people don't understand is the different types of flours.  Here is a quick review of them.

Flour/Meal

Flour is best described as grain ground to a powder, yeah, other stuff is ground and called flour, but truthfully, almost all the flour we use is made from grain.  Wheat being in the majority, with corn a distant second with rice and rye falling way behind as well as small amounts of others.

Wheat

The cereal grain called wheat is in the genus Tritium and although there are several species only 2 have much commercial importance.  The main one is Triticum aestivum, and the many cultivars of it account for over 90% of the wheat grown, the other is Triticum durum, and accounts for the majority of the rest, this is the wheat that semolina flour is made of, used chiefly for pasta and porridge type dishes

There are some of the ancient types of wheat grow for people who are into the "ancient grains" type food as yet another food fad.  These account for only a small part of wheat grown, their yields alone being one of the reasons they almost dissapeared.

The common wheat or bread wheat has many cultivars and are classed 6 ways:

Spring wheat is planted early in the spring and harvested in the fall, winter wheat is planted late summer or in the fall, goes dormant and is ready to harvest in the late spring or early summer.

Red wheat has a reddish brown bran and white wheat has a light colored bran, although the endosperm is white in both typed.

Also some are hard, meaning they contain a lot of gluten, soft contains less gluten.

Wheat flour types

Cake Flour

Cake flour as the name implies is mostly used for fine texture cakes, this is the softest flour aka contains the least amount of gluten (5-8%) giving the product a crumbly texture as in cake.

Pastry flour   

Pastry flour has the second-lowest gluten protein content, with 7.5-9%  gluten to hold together with a bit more strength than cake flour, but still produce flaky crusts rather than hard or crisp ones.  Mostly used for cookies and pie crust it also makes good biscuits and flour tortillas.

Plain or all-purpose flour   

All-purpose is middle of the road in gluten content at 9.5-12%. It has adequate protein content for bread and noodles, but is soft enough for biscuits and pastry crust.  The majority of flour used in home baking is of this type.

Bread flour   

Bread flour, or strong flour is high in gluten with 11.5-14%.  The increased protein helps the flour to hold the carbon dioxide released by the yeast, resulting in a stronger rise and tougher crumb.

Semolina/Durum flour

A hard flour made from Durum wheat used to make pasta.

Self-rising flour

Self rising flour is white flour with the right amount of baking powder and salt already added for baking quick breads.  Gluten content is 8-10%.

Instant flour

Simply precooked flour that won't leave a raw taste when used as a thickening agent.

Whole Wheat flour

Now we run into a confusing mess, not a real bad one but it is a broad class of flour.  Right off, most whole wheat flour does not really contain the whole kernel, most has had the germ removed to prevent the oil in the germ from getting rancid.  Some have had the oil in the germ removed and the ground germ added back to the flour. Some is just the ground kernel and has a short shelf life. Most is just the bran and endosperm.

Keeping the bran in the flour affects the rise of the dough, flour with the bran in it gives less loft to the bread compared to flour of the same wheat with the bran removed, there are several reasons for this, but simply the whole wheat flour with higher gluten content makes better bread with a higher loft as well as the finer ground flours.  If you want to make whole wheat bread with better loft and don't want to add white flour (the most common solution) then one needs to look for the flours made of the hard red spring wheat grown in Montana and the Dakota's, and look for the finer ground flour.

Graham flour

This flour named after Sylvester Graham and is a coarse ground whole wheat with the germ in it. Not used much today and not known much outside the US.

Rye flours

Rye flours come as dark rye and light rye, to avoid being confusing the term dark rye is rye ground with the bran on it like whole wheat, light rye has the bran removed.

The fine ground rye is scarce, I have a local source for it, and I can get it in both dark and light, the light in the fine ground giving the best loft.


Blended flour

Blended flour in my area was/is a flour made of 50% fine ground light rye and 50% white wheat flour.  With the popularity of rye bread this flour was sold as a blend to make rye bread which often uses a 50/50 mix.

Corn Flour/Corn Meal

Most ground corn today is coarser ground and it is called meal, in the past corn was ground to different degrees and the finer grinds would be called flour.

Today if you see fine ground corn it is usually in the form of Masa used to make corn tortillas and tamales.  This has been through what is called nixtamalization, a process where the unground corn is soaked in an alkaline liquid that removes the hull and softens the kernel.  This changes the flavor and unlocks Niacin that the human body can not absorb from normal corn.

Corn starch

Corn starch is simply the starch from the endosperm of the corn,  called corn flour in some countries, and came on the market just before the Civil War.  I included it here because it can be used as a substitute for flour in thickening dishes and can be used in flour to reduce the amount of gluten in the flour.  This method was often used in recipes till cake flour was developed in the late 1890's

Mixes

Corn bread, pancake, biscuit cake, they have all or most of the ingredients needed in the mix in a dry form or the oils are types such as coconut or palm that won't go rancid.

Most of the time you just add water and go, great is you don't mind dried eggs and milk.