Flours are so Pretty.
So you have committed your self to storing wheat, and then you think, “I should have stored flour instead of wheat, isn’t it wheat too?”
The fun answer is YES; sort of… the long, drawn-out, boring answer is as follows…
Mr. Wheat Kernel has had a wonderful life in the fields, soaking up the suns rays and living off the land. But today is harvest day, and he and many of his little buddies are on the road to becoming a yummy loaf of bread. You can tell that he is very excited.
OK this story is getting bad…let’s keep going without Mr. Kernel.
Much of wheat’s nutrition is stored in its moisture. Once you crack open the kernel, the nutrition begins to evaporate away. This is why wheat must be used within a very short time after being ground to flour.
To combat this issue, a processing plant, after grinding wheat (red or white), adds ingredients/nutrients back into the wheat that are lost during the process: niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, and folic acid to name a few. We call this product bleached white flour.
The bottom line is simple, store bought flour is easy to use and very good. Despite mans efforts however, it is not as nutritious as the original Mr. Kernel, and his shelf life has now gone from thirty+ years to about two years.
Store white flour, I do, just keep in mind the differences between whole wheat versus processed flour; shelf life and nutritional value.
2 comments:
Two years for flour?? Seriously???
I have seen a few sources that put the shelf life up to 5 years, under ideal conditions (cool and dark, off the concrete floor and away from other food items).
After all the kids moved out of my parents house, she began haveing a lot of storage go bad. Flour was one of them (about 4 years old).
Bottom line...rotate flour as a "use as you go" item. We use about 200 pounds per year, and we keep about 300 punds on hand.
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