There’s nothing quite like opening the oven door to reveal a beautiful loaf of bread, stunning tart or showstopping cake after a day of baking. It’s the perfect combination of science and craft, marrying perfect ingredient ratios with intuition and the senses to create something that’s so much more than the sum of its parts. That’s why the UK has been a proud baking nation for centuries, turning out all manner of delicious sweet and savoury treats which all rely on one simple ingredient: flour.
But not all flour is the same. While most of us reach for the bag of plain flour when baking, in recent years a plethora of exciting new varieties have appeared on shop shelves. The most interesting of these have also been wheat flours, but showcase the ‘ancient’ varieties that were muscled out when modern wheat became the crop of choice among arable farmers. Until then, people were baking with flour made from the likes of spelt, rye, Khorasan, emmer and einkorn as far back as 6000 BCE.