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Updated: June 16, 2025
The first layer, No. 8, which surrounds the center, produces small white middlings, harder and richer in gluten than the center; it bakes very well, and weighs 20 lb. in 100, and it is these 20 parts in 100 which, when mixed with the 50 parts in the center, form the finest quality flour, used for making white bread.
The gluten, when the wheat is mixed with water or some other liquid, becomes gummy and elastic, a fact that accounts for the rubbery consistency of bread dough. Cereals that contain no gluten do not make bread successfully. Next to wheat, rye contains protein in the greatest amount, and rice contains the least.
Composition of Proteins. Nearly all our meats are the muscle of different sorts of animals, made of a soft, reddish, animal pulp called myosin; the other principal proteins being white of egg, curd of milk, and a gummy, whitish-gray substance called gluten, found in wheat flour.
Partly because wheat bread has been easy to get and we have grown to like the taste, but chiefly because wheat flour gives the lightest loaf. To understand why, make a dough with a little white flour and water and then gently knead it in cold water. The consistency changes, the starch is washed out and a rubbery, sticky ball is left the gluten, which is the protein of the wheat.
It is impossible to set exact rules as to the quantity of flour or liquid to be used, for the quality of the flour varies as much as that of the grain from which it is made; and some varieties, excessive in gluten, will absorb nearly one-third more liquid than others, and produce correspondingly more bread.
The layer No. 7, which surrounds the preceding one, is still harder and richer in gluten; unfortunately in the reduction it becomes mixed with some hundredth parts of the bran, which render it unsuitable for making bread of the finest quality; it produces in the regrinding lower grade and dark flours, together weighing 7 per cent.
This gluten is the stuff that makes the paste and dough of wheat flour sticky, so that you can paste things together with it; while that made from corn meal or oatmeal will fall to pieces when you take it up.
It may be obtained from wheat flour by a mechanical operation, and in a state of tolerable purity; it is then called gluten, but the glutinous property belongs, not to vegetable fibrine, but to a foreign substance, present in small quantity, which is not found in the other cerealia.
To the fable was appended a retributive moral, viz., that the beche-de-mer occasionally revenged itself by expelling such a complicated mass of gluten that it became a net for the capture of the swift, which was slowly assimilated by its enemy. The Chinese, it may be said, with but slight perversion of fact, show equal partiality for the respective emblems of speed and sloth.
This is a consideration not to be passed over lightly; assuredly the gluten of the center contains as much azote as the gluten of the circumference, but it must not be admitted in a general way that the alimentary power of a body is in connection with the amount of azote it contains, and without entering into considerations which would carry us too wide of the subject, we shall simply state that if the flesh of young animals, as, for instance, the calf, has a debilitating action, while the developed flesh of full-grown animals of a heifer, for example has really nourishing properties, although the flesh of each animal contains the same quantity of azote, we must conclude that the proportion of elements is not everything, and that the azotic or nitrogenous elements are more nourishing in proportion as they are more developed.
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