What’s flour?

The ground seed of wheat grass. How complicated can it be? In fact flour is a much more complicated subject than most people think. Far from being a simple white powder we buy in five pound bags, flours come in a bewildering variety of types and styles. High gluten and low gluten, high extraction and low extraction, bleached and unbleached, finely ground and coarsely ground, foreign and domestic. Understandably, I get quite a few questions about it. This week I hope to sift through (no pun intended) a lot of the questions I’ve received over the past several months in the interest of creating a permanent resource that will answer basic flour questions. Let’s start with the standard flours available at the supermarket.