Before sliced bread, there was flour.

All the pretty flours...

Before sliced bread, the Cubs won the World Series. I keep hearing this as a reference to how long it's been. Well, things change. The Cubs are on top again, and I'm learning about flour.

Because I want to be a reliable baker who knows the difference between all-purpose, white wheat, and bread flour, today I'm brushing up on the basics. I'm baking soft dinner rolls with something called Strong White Flour. But first, what the heck is strong white flour?

Tired of being confused, I did some research for us, dear reader. Here's the low down on the most common flours. We teach best what we most need to learn, so they say. Hopefully, this will help us both.

First off, this is a wheat kernel. And probably more than you cared to know about it.

Most flour we use in the US comes from the wheat kernel of the wheat plant. The kernel has three sections: the bran, the endosperm, and the germ.

Bran. The bran is the outer shell of the kernel. The bran shell is fibrous.  The bran is what gives whole wheat…