F Is For Flour

Yes, flour is a very boring ingredient. It isn’t exotic, nor is it expensive or some sort of hidden treasure that you have been missing out on. With that being said, many of our favorite meals wouldn't exist without flour! This basic ingredient is almost taken advantage of because it is such a common place item. This blog post is dedicated to bread and noodle lovers everywhere, whose favorite dishes would be devastated without this oh so boring powder.

Mankind has relied on bread, as a means of a portable and filling food source, for thousands of years. We can thank flour for making bread a reality; it has always been a key ingredient.  It is believed that the process of making flour, by crushing wheat seeds between milling stones, was discovered around 6,000 BC.  In almost every culture, some sort of flour is used to create a variety of staple dishes.

Can you imagine how drastically different our culinary culture would be without the use of flour? Things like tacos, chicken noodle soup, lasagna, banana nut bread, pizza, any kind of breaded dish that is fried, and bagels would all be out the window. Flour plays a HUGE part in how the world cooks. I’m sure we could find a way to get along without flour, but the world would never be the same.

The most common type of flour is derived from wheat seeds, but we have many other options available to us then just this. To name a few, we have rice flour, buckwheat flour, chickpea flour, corn flour, coconut flour, potato flour, rye flour, almond flour, and tapioca flour. Almost any cereal grain can be milled into a flour product, but as you can see, many other items can be used to make an assortment of flour products.

Out of all of your favorite dishes, which one do you think you would miss the most if we didn’t have flour? I think I would be pretty upset if Pad Thai, a rice noodle dish from Thailand, never existed. Those darn rice noodles are just so delicious! I plan on making chicken noodle soup in several days, so check back later this week to get my noodle recipe as well as the recipe for chicken noodle soup. Tomorrow I will be blogging about garlic! One of my all time favorite herbs, I practically use it in everything so I hope to see you tomorrow!

Till next time,

~Mr.McLovin