Flour Power!

If you love baking or if you just bake every once in awhile, the chances are, you have used some type of flour. Breads, cookies, dinner rolls, cakes, you name it – each are hard to make without flour!

Did you know that there are several different types of flour? If you’ve ever baked anything from this blog, you’ve likely baked with whole wheat flour. Here on Kids Create, we like to use whole wheat flour because it is more nutrient dense than white flour/all-purpose flour.

There are many more types of flour than whole wheat and white. Some of these other types include:

White whole wheat flour
Cake or pastry flour
Bread flour
Gluten flour
Non-wheat flours: almond, amaranth, barley, corn, flaxseed, oat, peanut, potato, rice, rye, soy, and spelt.

Each of these types of flours are good for different types of baking. If you’d like to learn more about these flours, click here.

For now we’ll stick to the basics.😊 Earlier it was mentioned that whole wheat flour is more nutrient dense than white/all-purpose. What exactly does that mean? It simply means that there are more nutrients!

Flour is made from wheat grain which is made of three parts: bran, endosperm, and germ.

When white/all-purpose flour is refined (processed), the bran and germ are removed from the wheat grain.

When whole wheat flour is processed there is no removal of the bran and germ. You get the whole package!

Why is this important? Removing the bran and germ also removes important nutrients such as:

FIBER! (most people only consume half of the recommended amount of fiber)
Vitamin E
Vitamin B6
Phosphorus
Magnesium

You may see “enriched” flour at the store – this means vitamins and minerals have been added in during processing. While this may be beneficial, enriched flour is typically lower in fiber than whole wheat flour.

Whole wheat flour can be used in the same recipes/foods that use white flour. Next time you bake, look for a recipe that uses whole wheat flour! You can also experiment with a recipe by simply substituting half the flour it calls for with whole wheat flour.