The Origin of Flour and the Techniques Used in its Production

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The Origin of Flour
Flour is finely ground powder from cereal grains, seeds and roots. The product originates from a wide variety of plants but wheat is the major sources. Although flour is used in baking cakes and other types of foods, the commodity is well-suited for baking bread (Mazur). Consequently, flour contains various enormous amounts of gluten, a substance that encompasses strong and elastic proteins. Gluten forms a continuous network between the dough by trapping all the gases released into the product by leavening commodities yeast and baking powder in the baking process (Mazur). The gluten agent enhances rising of the dough during baking, resulting in a light soft product. In this case, the final product is bread. Flour originates from various products that are manufactured to obtain the fine product that is certified for both domestic and commercial purposes.
Flour has existed in the prehistoric times and the product is still used in modernization. Most of the global population use bread in various occasions, resulting in the dominance of the product as a staple food in the better part of the world's demographic. Although people may use flour for similar purposes, the origin of the product is different in various countries. The European, North America, Middle Eastern, Indian and North African cultures extract flour from wheat plants (History of bread). On the other hand, in Central America, the product is made from corns since ancient times up to date and central Europe gets flour from rye (Mazur). Finally, some cultures make flour from rice. Although the different cultures use different products to get flour, the final product is used for the same purpose of baking in most cases. Flour has dominated the baking processes in various countries since the ancient periods to the introduction of western cultures.
Archaeological evidence reveals that flour was introduced 30,000 years ago in Europe. Consequently, the existence of the product is not new since many people used the commodity in the past. The earliest techniques used in the production of flour involved grinding grains using stones. The method entailed the use of mortar and pestle, saddle stone and the quern (Mazur). The items involved rubbing of the materials, with the grain in between (Britannica). Consequently, all the devices where were indulged hand operation and use of body energy. This method should have been technically hard for the users as they had to implement a lot of energy and effort before at least acquiring a punch of flour for domestic purposes. However, the population did not have alternative methods and they had the task of persevering with the existing methods to get flour and enhance baking of the desired foods. Although modern cultures have devised new methods of making flour through the use of advanced technology, they cannot out since people living in historic times made efforts to produce the commodity.
However, modernization invented different and easier techniques of grinding flour. For instance, the ancient Greeks invented watermills before the introduction of 71 BC (History of bread). The milestones grinding the grains used water power and bed stone that ground the materials into pow...