Home baking is now a normal activity in many households. The manual part of bread making (mixing flours, kneading) is fascinating, but the main reason is that it is very easy to do the math: bake bread yourself rather than buying it at the supermarket, and you will save a lot of money.

In this article I will give en overview of wheat flour, by far the most common in bread baking. Wheat was one of the first plants to be grown by humanity, its first appearance dating back to thousands of years BC in the Fertile crescent in Southwest Asia. Later it spread to other areas, like Europe, Ethiopia and China. Nowadays the European Union is the world first producer of wheat (with France and Italy the main producers within the EU), followed by China.

The seed (or kernel) of wheat is composed of three parts. The bran is the outer shell, and contains fibers and vitamins (especially B). The endosperm is a source for starch (a polysaccharide carbohydrate). The germ is small, but full of vitamin E and B and antioxidants. These three parts can be combined to obtain different kinds of flour.

White flour as we know it, comes from the endosperm. When the germ is added to the endosperm, we have germ flour. When all three pats are grounded together, the result is Wholemeal (also called whole grain) flour. A particular kind of wholemeal flour is the so called “Graham” flour, where the three parts are treated separately and then out back together in the same proportions.

The right flour for bread baking is “strong.” The strength of a flour depends on the content of gluten, a proteic complex composed of glutenin and gliadin. Gluten absorbs water up to 150% of its weight, and when the dough is left to rise, it withholds the CO2 produced by the yeast, giving bread its typical bubbly and spongy texture. If you have ever kneaded strong flour you will have noticed that the more you work it, the harder the dough gets. This is the flour’s strength. Gluten forms a kind of elastic coat, that can be stretched while kneading and holds its shape when baked.

In the flour industry, there are different indicators and machineries to measure the strength of flours, but at the supermarket the only indicator left is the content of proteins on the label. Less than 10% means it is “soft”, 11-12% means it is strong enough to bake bread. Other than bread, strong flour is also used for bread-like products like pizza and Italian focaccia, or for fresh Italian pasta. All-purpose flour on the other hand, is “softer” and is used for cakes and pastries.