Cooking with Flour - Healthy Eating with Flour Recipes

A couple of months ago I wrote a natural health series book on cooking with wheat berries. Here is an introduction to one of the basic natural ingredients which is used extensively in cooking, but we overlook it so often, because we are so used to it.

Just imagine a life without bread, pastries, cakes, doughnuts, waffles, muffins, griddle cakes and other such delicious items. If we enjoy baking, the first ingredient which we are going to collect in our recipe list is going to be flour.

Nobody knows when cereals and grasses began to be used as flour, by mankind. Until then, he used to make his bread by making up a pounded paste of roots, bark and seeds, flattening it, and then cooking it on hot stones. As his tastes began to grow more and more sophisticated he found out that it was very easy to grow and then harvest cereals, and then grind them into a powder. This is the powder, which we hold so precious and, which we call Flour.

Many of the ingredients that we see now in baking recipes call for all-purpose flour. This is made from hard spring wheat. It is high in protein and it is normally used to replace highly refined pastry flour

Pastry flour is made from soft wheat and it gives a lighter texture to fragile baked products like small cakes, biscuits and pastries.

A Baker normally chooses the all-purpose flour for yeast dough, sauce thickening and strudels. In the same manner, cake flour is also a different type of flour. It is a soft wheat flour and is of very fine grain. It is velvety soft, when you handle it. It is perfectly white. However its protein value is very low.

But millenniums ago, people did not know much about all-purpose flours. They just knew that they could use buckwheat, rice, soybean, rye, potato, split peas, lentils, maize and cornmeal as the basis of a large number of flours. So, depending on the place where you live, you are going to get either refined white flour or whole wheat flour.