Wheat flour, Etymology & Making it

Wheat flour

Wheat Flour

Wheat flour is a flour or fine powder derived from grain, and is used as a base for cake makers, noodles and bread. Words in Indonesian flour is absorbed from the Portuguese, trigo, which means "wheat".

Wheat flour contains more starch substances, namely complex carbohydrates that are not soluble in water. Wheat flour contains proteins in the form of gluten, which play a role in determining the resilience of food made from wheat.

Etymology

The word "flour" is originally a variant of the word "flower." Both derive from the Old French fleur or flour, which had the literal meaning "blossom," and a figurative meaning "the finest." The phrase "fleur de farine'" meant "the finest part of the meal," since flour resulted from the elimination of coarse and unwanted matter from the grain during milling.

Making wheat flour

Wheat flour obtained from milling wheat that experienced several stages of processing (Paul & Helen 1972). Some of these processing stages are stages of preparation and milling stages. Preparation phase includes the process of cleaning (cleansing), dampening (pelembapan), and conditioning (conditioning). Cleaning stage, wheat cleaned of impurities such as dust, other than seeds of wheat (like seed corn, soybeans), bran, wheat stems, stones, gravel, metal, and others. Contaminant-contaminant should be separated from the wheat before milling process. Use coarse sieve and magnet can separate foreign objects and metal substances contained in wheat. Small contaminant requiring special treatment to separate it from wheat.

Wheat that had been cleared through the next process is the process of dampening and conditioning. Dampening process is the process of adding water to the mixture of wheat has the desired water content. Dampening process depends on the moisture content of grain, density, hardness and grain. The amount of water added can be calculated mathematically using the equation:

                                  

W is the amount of water added (kg), M2 is the desired moisture content (%), M1 is the initial grain moisture content (%), and Q is the weight of wheat (kg).

After going through the process of further dampening wheat suffered conditioning by adding water to the wheat and aged for a certain time to really sink in water. This phase aims to create a clay grain leather that is not destroyed when the ground water levels and can achieve the desired flour and facilitate endosperm separated from the skin and soften the endosperm.

The next stage is the stage which includes the process of breaking milling, reduction, sizing, and tailings. The principle of milling process is to separate the endosperm from the aleurone cell layer or layers of the skin. Beginning with the process of breaking, endosperm crushed into particles of uniform size in powder-sized flour. The next stage of milling is the process of reduction, reduced endosperm that had been destroyed again into flour, sifted henceforth to be separated from the bran and pollard. During the milling process produced side products such as bran, pollard, pellets, and the flour industry. The purpose of this milling stage to obtain a high extraction yield with good quality flour. A good meal process generally produces 74-84% of wheat flour bran and pollard, while approximately 20-26%. Analyzed in starch production quality control laboratory for analysis contents in wheat flour that includes determining moisture, ash, protein, and gluten content, color test, test farinograph, ekstensograph, alveograph, amylograph, as well as microbiological analysis.