What is Flour?

Flour is the finely ground powdered material obtained from food crops like wheat, corns, and pulses. Wheat flour is the most common and is used in the production of bread. The dough is prepared from wheat flour and is used to bake pieces of bread out of it. Dough prepared from the flour contains gluten which is enriched in proteins. It is gluten where gases produced from yeast and other bacteria make the dough fluffy and eventually softer.

 

Process of Flour Milling And Grinding 

 In ancient times grinding was done by sliding rocks with wheat in between. It was a great technology for that time period. Thankfully, we have the much better technology to serve us today. Let us divide this section into subheadings to go into details of Flour Milling:

• Cleaning the Wheat – The wheat obtained from the fields is not in the best of conditions and it is obligatory to clean it thoroughly before any other thing. There is a device called separator that does the job here as it removes the unwanted particles and adulterations from the raw material. Then there are aspirators which aim at removing minute particles which are much lighter than wheat grains.

 

• Preparing the Raw Material – Once the cleaning phase is over, we can proceed further to prepare the raw material for grinding purposes. Here the wheat is dried to make sure that extra moisture is taken care of. Also, wheat is sometimes conditioned with hot water or cold water treatments. Conditioning helps in improving the quality of the raw materials.

 

• Grinding – This is the real action; here the raw material is ground to make a powder out of the wheat grains. First of all, all types of grains are blended well to form a batch of the raw material.

 

Now, this batch is introduced to two big rollers which are ready to crush each grain into powder. These rollers are called breaker rolls. With the help of filters, the powder is collected according to their particles sizes. The finer particles with finest ones are collected at one place. With the help of vibrations, cleaning is done at this stage as well. Upon vibration, the lighter particles skip the heavier ones.

 

• Processing – Now we have the flour with us, we just need to process it. In other words, this is the final touch before the flour is packed and dispatched. In this phase, bleaching and oxidizing agents are used to ensure good quality of the wheat flour.

These four stages sum up The Process of Flour Milling. Now the flour is ready to be used, rather baked into breads.

 

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