The flour is present in the diet of the man from such a long time it is impossible precisely to determine, who and in what circumstances hit the idea of the grains crumbling and baking a bread out of it. As Marek Konarzewski from the Institute of the Biology writes in his book ‘There was hunger at the beginning’, the first signs of the wheat growing were found 200 kilometers to the north of Abu Hureyr, a small settlement in the Euphrates valley. The examinations of archeologists and biologists appoint it was being bred there 9.5 thousand of years BC. Nowadays there is here a barren semi desert, but actually thanks to local cultivations made thousands of years ago the lands between the Mediterranean sea and the Persian Gulf are being called the Fertile Crescent. The grains of wheat are inedible for the man. In order to include them in one’s menu, man had to learn to grind it and leave it to action of the highest temperature. Also, in order to use their benefits effectively, it was necessary to overcome the art of the drying and storing grains. According to archaeologists’ exploring it took thousands of years.
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The variety of flours is so huge that in order to describe them one needs to apply few categories. The flour that came into existence as a result of grinding the wheat, the spelt and the rye, named as bread flour, is the main bread’s and other bakery products’ ingredient. Flours made of barley, oat, maize, rice, soya, pea and bean’s grains are determined as non-bread ones and are only an addition to the bread. A special type of flour is potato flour which arises not from wheat grains, but from potato starch and it has condensing properties.
You can read more in a printed version of the Usta magazine.
Spelt, wheat, barley
